The Global Ethical Mission of the United States

The English Complex in America: Would the Venerable Bede please comment?

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.
—George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States

The question, “What is an American?” was first asked by Crèvecoeur late in the eighteenth century, and a little later by de Tocqueville, both of whom gave much the same answer as Santayana. Since moral imperatives overlap the divine, and vice versa, American “exceptionalism” easily becomes a mission to spread democracy, freedom and belief, or their obverse, American egoism, isolationism and protectionism. The persistence of the pattern is unsurprising. The power of myth is strong over the human mind, even over the rational part of it, now recognised as vanishingly small in a brain unevolved since the Stone Age. (Depth psychologists confirm this judgment, as do major movie studios: according to the Economist, the movie studios’ bottom line depends on how far and how often they press Stone Age buttons.)¹ But myth is a pity if it obscures the English origins of American exceptionalism.

All myths, including exceptionalism, are founded at least somewhat on fact, historical or psychological. The people and Constitution of America have long been sources of global inspiration. They sparked democratic changes in old Europe itself, built a nineteenth-century growth economy behind high protective barriers, and after old Europe’s meltdown in the twentieth century’s thirty years war, took on world leadership. Both people and Constitution frequently live up to and sometimes excel traditional ideas of what constitutes a nation, certainly anything put forth by forerunners in the history of national ideas by writers such as Locke or Montesquieu, some of whose views reappear in the US Constitution, or by later writers, such as the Romantics, Herder or Renan. In every century one nation is cast in the role of the angels and another in, well, the other role. America has often been happily cast.

In some general way, America is taken to represent the best of humanity. Its population draws from almost all peoples. The single largest group is persons of German origin, and indeed, America today—perhaps especially today—is unimaginable without the German influence. American language, for starters, is tinged with that strange mix of structural complexity and raw energy that works so well in German but which packs a force that the lighter structures of English—to the extent English has structures—seem less adapted to carry. French revolutionary ideals sometimes seem evident: voting for public official positions, including judges, and the sheer scale of litigation, perhaps reflect the litigious tenacity of French peasantry.² And following the warnings of classical Greek and Latin textbooks, the balance of powers set out in the Constitution aims to limit the dangers of hubris inherent in power. But England, country of origin for the language, is the source of the second most populous group; one senses America is never more American than when it is English.

Start with the City on the Hill. The tap roots of Britain’s national history lie in religion. The ancient heresy that evil can be defeated once and for all—indeed, that good and evil are separate qualities inhabiting different bodies—was a teaching of Morgan, a fourth-century Briton better known as Pelagius, man of the seas. Augustine, who knew that good and evil reside in the same all-too-human body of every one of us, early spotted the Pelagian threat, identified it as a dangerous illusion, and inveighed tirelessly against it. It is easy to see that Pelagianism, along with its hubris, won out in an America where expressions such as “the axis of evil” resonate in ways they fail to do anywhere else in the Western world, which is nowadays distinctly more Augustinian. Against this background, it is also an error to report American ideas as “Manichean”. That idea divides the world into warring factions of good and evil, but does not suggest victory on either side can ever be final.

The British Isles, seen as a single block uniting peoples of disparate origins, was an invention of other Churchmen. The Venerable Bede called the first Synod for all England at Hertford in 673. He and other clerics of the seventh and eighth centuries administered the Church as a single business with branches over England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. By similar acts of creative, if unilateral fiat, the idea of geographical unity was extended from Church to state by successive power brokers: Alfred and his courtiers, the translators and reformers of the ninth century, the political theologians of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as well as the iconographers. The Wilton Diptych, 1397–99, gives one idea of how it was done. It shows Edmund, one of the first kings, Edward the Confessor and Richard II in a demi-religious landscape as Richard receives his authority directly from the Holy Virgin. And, yes, the English rose and banner feature aloft, borne by angels. Nowadays these exercises in symbolic organisation tend to look stage-managed or poetic fantasy or both, perhaps because symbolic imaginings from the Venerable Bede to Werner Heisenberg always betray the inherent shakiness of human instrumental reason.³ But back then, symbols threw bridges across the mental chasms of divergent origins—Celtic, Germanic and Norman French—lines still visible today and a source of gentle humour at Christmas dinner among friends.

Ockham and his followers turned the screw further. They demanded separation of philosophy (in the sense of a science) from theology, and new formulas for the relations between church, state and peoples. After Wycliffe, popular thinking joined up with that of the elites, turning from evil Continental paths to follow those of English exceptionalism. Each twist rendered state policy more populist, more nationalist—and less Continental.

The deeply popular nature of the Reformation in England allowed Henry VIII to establish himself unilaterally head of the English Church. This move was unique in Europe: in France for example, Francois I negotiated the division of Church benefits with Rome. Henry’s move awarded him unchallenged authority over his country as a nation, and awarded rich London lawyers and merchants the spoils of disestablished assets at reasonable rates—a phenomenon also perhaps seen when ruling ideologies have fallen in other countries more recently. English Church officers put up little resistance. They sent sermons in to Henry for advance approval while his commissioners checked on their services and otherwise took care of his interests. According to Cyril Garbett, “many methods of the modern police state were employed at that time, 400 years ago, to spy on and intimidate a Church of dubious loyalty”.⁴

In all this Elizabeth was her father’s daughter. She appointed bishops to office and thereafter treated them as hirelings. They were required, if seeking career advance, to attend sessions of the Upper House, a light-ish duty requiring no policy input but one which took them away from their own power bases for long periods. (A similar ploy occurred to Louis XIV, who neutralised his aristocracy by requiring year-round attendance for ceremonies at Versailles, rebuilt to keep them on hand.) As the population was largely illiterate, English churches became a functional tier of government. State decrees were published in parishes, and sermons with political messages were vital to English national life.⁵

What lay indeed at the basis of both general literacy and a national sense were Church instruments: the Book of Common Prayer, created by Cranmer in 1552, and the Authorised Version of the English Bible, a summary by committee of pre-existing English translations, in 1611.⁶ Then as now, they were recognised as outstandingly beautiful, but much like international treaties today—although these are not often seen as beautiful—their main achievement was political compromise. Their phraseology enabled all religious factions to see something of themselves reflected somewhere in the outcome. Until the nineteenth century, moreover, these works were not only the principal reading of ruling classes, they were the only ones for common people. All classes thus learned to see themselves inheritors of the promise of “Israel” and to bear its messages in their hearts, as shown by Cromwell, the Puritans, John Wesley, Matthew Arnold, and in the last century, Rudyard Kipling. The evidence is: the English absorbed the complex of a chosen people, indeed as one of the lost tribes of Israel.⁷

All this is fairly uncontroversial. Less generally commented upon is the peculiarly English concept of the monarch as a kind of God-in-Christ figure, summed up in the legal concept of the “King’s Two Bodies” and still part of English law as late as Blackstone’s Commentaries and the reign of George III, who ran into troubles over this idea, along with much else. In the seventeenth century, this wholly mystical jurisprudential idea essentially underlay the activities of English revolutionaries, who went so far as to express their political activities as opposing the King only as a physical, mortal man (one of his bodies) in order to save his immortal reign (his eternal mystical body), a kind of killing the King to save the King idea with strong Christological overtones, as Ernst Kantorowicz has pointed out. Here is not the place to recite the centuries of jurisprudence beyond noting the intensity of the Biblical connotations and their incorporation of sublime notions of sacrifice, betrayal and the necessity to take revenge along the axis of evil—think Shakespeare’s Richard II or Milton.⁸

So far as continuing influences emanating from the Continent were concerned, Britain continued to respond by moving away. The counties in England freely borrowed customs from each other, but not from the Continent. According to historians of jurisprudence, customary law came to be seen everywhere as reflecting wider national character, not merely as “a repetition or imitation of similar acts but as manifestations of a nation’s collective unconscious”.⁹ The common law has ever since been seen as a legal singularity, a view perhaps best represented by the sheer mystical enthusiasm of Blackstone’s eighteenth-century Commentaries, which incidentally became a standard reference for all American lawyers, including Lincoln.¹⁰

The English commercial spirit also evolved in wholly un-Continental ways. According to Barrington Moore, decisive for commerce in England was “the independence of the landed gentry and nobility from the crown, their adoption of commercial agriculture, partly in response to the growth of a trading and manufacturing class … and the disappearance of the peasant problem”. In France, by contrast, the nobility developed as a mere regal appendage. “Instead of a landed upper class turning to commercial agriculture in the English manner, we find in France … mainly a nobility living from what it can extract through obligations resting upon the peasants.”¹¹

Overall, English exceptionalism thus ran along several parallel lines: the nationwide policies of clerics and monarchs; the evolution of commerce and the common law; the advance of scientific philosophy over superstitious belief. The fires of popular enthusiasm were usually stoked by illiterate—if not outright Pelagian—priests, although Wycliffe, who was not illiterate, was the enthusiast who stirred Wat Tyler’s peasant revolt of 1381. The Lollards were his direct descendants, as were the seventeenth-century Puritans, non-conformists and the eighteenth-century political revolutionaries of England, and of course, America.

A centuries-long complex of ideas and experience thus underpins the unique British sense of superiority, less visible but still sometimes observable among nations today. It arose in a weak and backward country, grew strongly in the seventeenth century by brilliant English advances in science, and matured in the eighteenth with English commercial dominance and conquest. But the physiology of ideas alone does not capture the felt impression of the whole. The English complex is arguably best conveyed in Kipling’s writings, the shadings and subtleties of which bring its whole personality to life: a chosen people in possession of practicality, determination and a global ethical mission. Such a people must be presumed to be in want of a fortune. But while all historical imperialisms bear a shadow side, British imperialism was never merely imperialistic. The truly distinctive factor was ever the tinge of a chosen people, “grand jury of humanity”, bearers of responsibility for human advancement as well as arms for national enrichment, if there was national enrichment.¹² Correctly read, Kipling’s Stalky and Co along with most stories in the repertoire may stand without too much irony as a rough summary of the English complex. Kipling even shows tit-for-tat ranks among humanity’s prime ethical values.

The eighteenth century was not a particularly religious age and in America perhaps no more so than anywhere else, argues R. R. Palmer in his classic study The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1958).¹³ This is somewhat to miss the point that what was transferred to America were habits of mind developed in the forcing house of religious politics. David Hackett Fischer, by contrast, identifies the origins of attitudes in America with English religious views held during early settlement days in North America.¹⁴ He agrees with Dickens’s claim that the “Anglo-Saxon attitude was transplanted to North America … reinforced by Puritan and evangelical habits of moralising in Manichean terms of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil—especially evil”. British migrants, says Fischer, “responded to the problem of evil by trying to move away from it”, reinforcing old ideas of separatism in new lands:

They did not want colonies of other nations anywhere nearby. In North America, British settlers and soldiers moved quickly to take over foreign posts—peacefully where possible, forcibly when necessary. They seized neighbouring Dutch colonies (1664), annexed Swedish settlements (by 1700), captured French possessions in Arcadia (1710–55), and conquered the St Lawrence Valley (1759–60).

After independence the United States pursued a similar policy by other means. As national wealth increased, purchase became the method of choice … When offers of purchase failed, America did not hesitate to use force. West Florida, Texas, Utah, California, New Mexico and Arizona … In 1823, President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams laid down a rule that the American Hemisphere was off-limits to European powers. Most presidents endorsed the Monroe Doctrine and many supported it by armed force.

As for “America’s Great Rule of Unilateralism”, Fischer says this appeared long before the War of Independence. It was strong in New England as early as the first generation of setters when leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony cut the cross out of their English flag, framed their own laws, minted their own money, levied their own taxes and admitted and expelled immigrants as they pleased, banished anyone who displeased them, conducted their own foreign relations, made war as if they were a sovereign power and in general kept the rest of the world at bay, especially King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud … A sort of autonomy grew stronger with these events and persisted in New England and other American colonies for five generations before 1763 …

And on the need to keep evil influence at bay, Fischer shows contradiction was inherent in Jefferson’s Inaugural Address, which recommended “honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”, even as he favoured international trade and intellectual exchange. Nevertheless, “during World War II and the Cold War, seven presidents expanded the Monroe Doctrine to exclude ‘foreign ideologies’ such as Fascism and Communism, from the American Hemisphere”. In the twenty-first century leaders on the “Democratic left and Republican right” adopted extreme positions of George Washington’s “great rule” and Thomas Jefferson’s fear of “entangling alliances”. Fischer does not comment on the influence of the King’s Two Bodies idea but its connotations were clearly part of what today’s linguists might call the “semiological universe” of the seventeenth century in the moment of transference to America.

Conclusion

David Hackett Fischer sets out much of what may be seen today of American presence in the world: a complex of separateness and superiority linked to more or less distinct outlines of what should be called Pelagianism, the use and necessity of going out with force to impose policy ends. His account confirms the transference of such modes of thought through tenets of religion brought with them by early British settlers in the seventeenth century. The origins of these attitudes, however, lie far deeper than the moment of transference. They lie in inventions of the early British Church and in the unilateral use of instrumental reason to solve policy problems, forging and re-forging percussively similar answers over the centuries.

These continuities seem in danger of being lost. The days of Kipling are not that far behind us, but despite the immense power of Disney Kipling, his succinct summaries of the English spirit seem oddly displaced by the rise of rational secularisation, scientific managerialism and a tide of cynicism about post-colonial history.¹⁶ Such trends tend to make the religious origins seem passé, if not quaint.

As an outcome, this is extraordinary. There is some idea among modern students of culture—perhaps set in motion by Burkhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy—that the rational mind has suddenly superseded the last hundred thousand years of superstition, religion and the human underground or, so to say, the invariant condition of humanity. That idea seems as absurd now as it did to Freud, who shrewdly chose to go against views on dreams held by the scholars of his time in favour of views held by everybody else. Setting aside the matter of dreams for clinicians, something of Freud’s procedure may still be relevant. A few low-level observations drawn from everyday experience may point up the persistence of the human underground, for example, the involuntary hush that can descend on morning-tea tables around the world today when someone gets a “bad” horoscope. Or publicity for touring Anglo-American hard rock bands, hugely popular in Australasia, which features images from the hell-ish medieval undergrounds depicted by Brueghel, a painter from England’s own early doppelganger nation. At a higher level, Fischer’s sideways look at election campaigns ever shows appeals to the human underground of hopes and fears. As every theologian knows, where hell is present, heaven cannot be far, perhaps especially where iron and steel mills arise in green and pleasant lands.

The principal difference between the last hundred thousand years and today seems to be that what was once debated and contained within the institutions or practices of religion, has now, in the West at any rate, moved outside them. And there, the churches have lost the battle in the same way the Roman Church lost it when the battle was internal, namely, running up against the ordinary human tendency to get impatient about anything that is not instant fun.¹⁶ But like cynicism itself, the works of rationalism and scientific managerialism look paper-thin when compared with the output of those who forged England’s sense of itself—the medieval English Church, Cranmer, Bible translators, Milton, even the Breughel-ish Dickens, whose report on America recalls that “[Laura] can make them serve her … takes advantage of them and makes them wait upon her, in a manner that she knows she could not exact of others; and in various ways shows her Saxon blood.”

The confluence of conflicting forces has, however, given rise to confusion for some modern minds, evident for example in comparative soundings taken in the 1970s by Stephen Spender.¹⁷ But despite shades of difference, political notions on both sides of the Atlantic exhibit the imprint of family resemblance by descent.

Latterly, millennial cultural trends in America have sparked renewed interest in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “melting pot” theory—assimilation of the most talented immigrants the world had to offer. The 2015 book America Ascendant, by Stanley Greenberg, political adviser to President Clinton in 1992 and a journalist, offers such a view: “from the beginning, the economic and political elites and the public intellectuals constructed an intellectual framework that highlighted America as a welcoming nation for people from different traditions, histories and battles”.¹⁸ He claims, with supporting poll-based analysis, that the values of millennials and city-dwellers now run predominantly along these lines. But the historical record shows power so soft lay far outside the original policy mix. And however accurate the polls of 2015, political developments last year seem to have thrown up hard questions for the country at large.

Greenberg cites the non-consensual or unilateral style of legislation passed in Republican-dominated states as reason to see “alt-right” approaches limited in scale and appeal country-wide. And thinking to contrast America’s elective differences from Britain, Greenberg quotes David Cameron, the former British Prime Minister, who said of Britain that the “doctrine of state multiculturalism” was a failure because it allowed the “weakening of collective identity”.¹⁹ Current developments in America, however, may simply re-affirm the non-elective affinities. It remains as difficult as ever to distinguish this American complex from the strain of older ideas inherited, as Fischer shows, from the English.

So as it were, having started the family off down this track, could the Venerable Bede please comment? The political theoretician in him might be persuaded, just. But inasmuch as Bede was also practical politician, likely enough, he couldn’t possibly.

Notes:

1. The Economist, December 19, 2015, p.13

2. Interest in Germany has recently revived, with new sales for Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, 1935, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, 2004; and Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Democracy and Socialism, 1944, cautions that Lincoln’s dictum on the impossibility of “fooling all of the people all of the time” might be irrelevant if short run deceptions permanently alter the general run of events. For insights on French peasantry, I am indebted to French revolutionary history lectures by Judith Bassett, Auckland University, October, 2016.

The Wilton Diptych: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/english-or-french-the-wilton-diptych

3. As Hume liked to explain, “reason is the slave of the passions”, although Ernst Kantorowicz, a medieval historian, preferred “slave to its own fictions”; The King’s Two Bodies, A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton, 1957, p.5

4. Church and State in England, London, 1950, p.39

5. Godfrey Davies, “English Political Sermons, 1603 -1640,” The Huntington Library Quarterly, October 1939, p.1-22. William Doyle shows the Church natural supporter of government authority and the parish as “key to control” in all countries from Ireland to Russia but does not bring out the significantly more subservient status of the Anglican Church, The Old European Order, 1660-1800, Oxford, 1978, p.152.

6. The background scholarship was Europe-wide but its uses were domestic: Debora Kuller Shugar, The Renaissance Bible, Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity, Berkeley, 1994, p.16

7. Louis B Wright, “The Significance of Religious Writings in the English Renaissance, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 1940, pp.59-68; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, Chicago, 1992. In the 1950s, Queen St in Auckland boasted a “British Israelites” bookshop with a window display of an open Bible alongside the Union Jack and a photo of Queen Elizabeth II.

8. Kantorowicz, op cit. For Milton’s similarly egoistic absolutism, see Hugh Trevor Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, London 1987, pp232-281.

9. Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia, Cambridge, 2005, p.415

10. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law, An Essay on Blackstone’s Commentaries, Chicago and London, 1941. Helgerson, op cit, summarises recent legal scholarship showing the Common Law less radically different from Continental systems than presumed, but perhaps the most important point is that the English thought they were different.

11. Barrington Moore, Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969, p.40. De Tocqueville observed the English approach was good for nobles and merchants but led to mass poverty; France, if less prosperous, avoided the worst by continuing peasant ownership of small holdings (Sur le paupérisme, Paris, 1837). In spirit, De Tocqueville is oddly close to Marx here.

12. “Grand jury” was de Tocqueville’s view, Letter to Harriet Grote. Colonies were net losses to England in Campbell v Hall, 1774 for Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Indianapolis, 1981, p.594. From Goethe on, German writers took the English “gentleman” as an ideal type of humanity; the English word exists in both German and French in its own right, untranslatable to any native equivalent.

13. Princeton, 1958, p. 192. In Campbell v Hall, 1774, Lord Mansfield could for example refer casually to “the mad enthusiasm of the Crusades” – in Speeches and Documents on Colonial History, ed. Arthur Berriedale Keith, London, 1953, p.41.

14. Fairness and Freedom, A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States, New York, 2013, pp.334-339.

15. Jonathan Ralston Saul describes trends and shows how “systems” thinking tends to obliterate both substantive content and memory, especially of self and origins, Voltaire’s Bastards, The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Toronto, 1992. For trends in history writing to paint the second half of the twentieth century as black as the first, perhaps falsifying both, see for example, Paul Johnson, A History of the Modern West, From 1917 to the 1990s, London, 1983, with electronic updates to 2010.

16. For the life of ideas and the co-presence of paganism within the medieval Church, see F M Powicke, “The Christian Life,” in G C Crump and E F Jacob (eds), The Legacy of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1926, p.35. On how ordinary people thought, see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, 1978, or Emmanuel Le Roy Durie, Le Carneval at Romans, Paris, 1979. For the hermeneutic incomprehensibility of at any rate, Jewish and Christian scriptures, see Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, 1697; Frank Kermode’s, The Genesis of Secrecy, Harvard, 1979, summarises much modern scholarly insight. For the manner in which the “excesses” of medieval ecstatic religion, including sacrifice, torture and eroticism, have migrated from their Church home to the secular pastures of today, see Kuller Shuger, op cit., pp.192-5.

17. Stephen Spender, Love-Hate Relations, A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities, London, 1974

18. New York, 2015, p.54

19. ibid, p.52