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The Cultural Connections of the English-Speaking Peoples
Keith Windschuttle
Published in James Guest (ed.), The American Century from Afar, the Boston, Melbourne, Oxford Conversazioni on Culture and Society, Melbourne, 1999
Earlier this year, the American author Kevin Phillips published a book called
The Cousins' Wars, which argued that there are strong cultural
connections between the English Civil War of 1640-1649, the American War of
Independence of 1776-1783 and the Civil War of the United States of 1861-1865.
[1] In each case, the protagonists on both sides were very much the same kind of
people with the same religious beliefs, political affiliations and economic
interests. And rather than representing three distinct contests, the wars should
be seen as the deciding events in a long process that led from the origins of
English Protestantism in the sixteenth century to the global dominance of the
American political and economic system in the twentieth. Over three centuries, Phillips argues, similar sides were taken in each of
these three wars. On the long-term winning side were the constituencies of
commerce, industry, the maritime sector, the centers of immigration, the
principal cities, low church evangelical religion, and the proselytizing middle
classes. The long-term losing side was based on landed agriculture, with its
feudal remnants and servitude, its hierarchical and liturgical religion, and its
greater ratios of horsemen, soldiers and cavaliers. For example, the American War for Independence, Phillips argues, should be
regarded more as a civil war within the colonies than as a colonial revolution
against the crown. The disagreements that led to it show remarkable similarities
to those behind the English Civil War the previous century. It was a fight over
diverging interpretations of the rights of Englishmen and the British
constitution. There were comparable objections from small producers to the
policies of mercantilism and Crown monopolies. There were protests by Puritans
and other anti-episcopalian dissenters against the monarchical imposition of
Anglicanism and Catholicism. The war was led by New England Yankees, the direct
descendants of the original Puritan settlers. They reproduced many of the
political interests, and even the political geography of their ancestors. The
"powder keg of the American revolution", Phillips says, was located in counties
called Suffolk and Essex (Massachusetts Bay), as well as in places like Boston,
Norwich, Chelmsford, Dedham and Braintree, named by Massachusetts and
Connecticut settlers after their East Anglia hometowns. Phillips draws similar analogies in the Civil War of the 1860s. By this time,
however, there had been waves of Yankee migration westward from the old New
England heartland. This had led to the creation of what he defines as Greater
New England, a cultural region stretching west through upstate New York, Ohio,
Michigan and Minnesota to Oregon and Puget Sound. The American Civil War
occurred, Phillips argues, because the intense, entrepreneurial, Protestant
Yankees of this Greater New England were at cultural, religious and political
odds with the Greater South. Ultimately, Phillips wants us to see the present
globalization of liberal-democratic politics and market-driven economics as both
the fulfillment of the English Reformation and the irresistible emergence of a
new imperial community of English-speaking peoples. Now, in terms of political and religious history, I think this thesis is
flawed by its assumption that the English Civil War was a Puritan revolution.
Had he read the most recent works by English revisionist historians Phillips
might have become disabused of this idea and might also have played down the
emphasis he places on Yankee Puritanism as the cause these conflicts. This
apart, however, I think Phillips gets the sociological inheritance of the United
States pretty right. In particular, I was impressed by his insistence on the
Englishness of American history, of how loyalties, grievances, disputes and
terminology that originated in England crossed the Atlantic and played
themselves out on the American continent not only in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries but until well into the twentieth. The third volume of Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire was published in 1781. At that time, New York was still
occupied by English forces and the outcome of the War for Independence that had
started in 1776 was by no means certain, though to Gibbon and other intelligent
observers it seemed the dissident colonists would eventually prevail. In a
footnote towards the end of Volume Three of his magnum opus, Gibbon comments on
this contemporary struggle, observing that as far as the future of civilized
society was concerned, it did not matter if the Americans did break with the
mother country. 'Whatever may be the changes of their political situation,' he
wrote, 'they must preserve the manners of Europe; and we may reflect with some
pleasure, that the English language will probably be diffused over an immense
and populous continent.' [2] Gibbon's history is not only a story about the end
of the Roman Empire but is just as much about the development of 'the manners of
Europe', that is, of the civilisation of Western Christendom that emerged from
the ruins of Rome. If we are to talk sensibly about the culture of contemporary America we need
to recognize that the United States is one of the chief products of Western
Christendom and that, just like Australia, it was formed by the West as a whole
as well as by England in particular. The notion that the United States is some
separate, alien or essentially different country to Australia is historically
untrue. As well as a common language, we share a common culture. Until the 1990s, discussion by historians about the nature of Western culture
has been out of fashion for many decades but since the fall of Communism it has
undergone a revival. One of the most adventurous of the new school is the work
by David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents,
which was published last year. Let me outline Gress's thesis, look at some of
its major omissions and then suggest how it could be shored up by some
considerations from English history. Gress's book is an attempt to identify the chief causal elements of the
historical development of western civilisation. He is arguing against an older
version of this story that he calls the 'Grand Narrative'. This was created in
the first half of the twentieth century by a group of American authors that
included Will Durant in The Story of Civilization and William McNeill in
The Rise of the West. It told an essentially benign story that saw
liberty as fundamental to the West but defined it as an abstract, philosophical
principle devised by intellectuals and transmitted down through the ages in a
series of great books. It said that liberty was born in ancient Athens, but
subsequently honoured more in the breach than the observance. It was preserved
not so much in practice but as a set of ideas until the Enlightenment of the
eighteenth century. It finally became manifest in the Constitution of the United
States of America. In his alternative version, Gress plays down the influence of Greece and
elevates that of Rome. He emphasises that the West is just as much heir to Roman
imperialism as it is to the Roman contribution to law. He also acknowledges that
the Gothic invaders who emerged from the forests of Germany in the Dark Ages
were not the negative forces they are usually portrayed but brought with them
seeds of liberty. They did this, Gress writes, because they established
monarchies based on ordered and law-governed hierarchies of nobility, security
of ownership of land, and responsible administration that encouraged
agriculture, commerce and useful arts. [3] I think Gress's critique of the Grand
Narrative succeeds in that he does show how liberty has been transmitted as much
through political practices as through books and thinkers, and he gives a much
more historically grounded and credible version of the origins of the West. He is also right to emphasise the Germanic role in the development of the
West. However, in demolishing one myth, he creates another. I don't want to
dispute his assessment of the Gothic era but it is not hard to show that, from
the eighteenth century onwards, the positive contributions made by Germany to
politics in the West have been thin on the ground, while their negative
contributions have been disastrous. Gress confines his discussion of the major
political movements in the eighteenth century to what he calls the 'radical
Enlightenment' of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the French revolutionaries who
followed him; and the 'sceptical Enlightenment' represented by liberals such as
Montesquieu, David Hume, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith. He largely omits
discussion of the German Enlightenment and its two major theorists of history,
Hegel and Herder. As everyone knows, the political and intellectual tradition
that began with Hegel produced the thought of Karl Marx and eventually merged
with French Jacobinism to produce the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath.
Thanks to the collapse of the USSR in 1989-90, that tradition has now run its
course and been consigned to the dustbin of history. However, the second product
of eighteenth century Germany, the Romantic nationalism of Johann Gottfried von
Herder, remains one of the major defining issues of twentieth century history.
Herder was the man who originated two of the most influential concepts of the
modern era: cultural relativism and self-determination. He said that people who
constitute a language group, no matter how small and undistinguished, have their
own culture which cannot be judged by outside standards and which are authentic
in their own terms -- all cultures are equal but different. He also argued that
all unique cultures deserve to determine their own destiny -- every culture
should form a nation. Though Herder was a conservative, his ideas let loose on Europe the then
radical concept of nationalism. Within a century, the wars of German unification
were waged to enforce the idea that all German volkes must be affiliated to the
German state. In the twentieth century the extension of this idea helped produce
the First and Second World Wars. Under Hitler, its logic led to the extirpation
of those who did not qualify as part of volk culture. In the Balkans today,
Herder's romanticism is represented by, on the one hand, the reckless pursuit of
national liberation and, on the other hand, by the sinister euphemism of ethnic
cleansing. As well as omitting German romanticism, there is another problem about Gress's interpretation of the German contribution to Western culture. When he talks about the Germanic tribes emerging from the forests in the early Middle Ages bearing the seeds of liberty, he is including the Angles, Saxons and Danes who conquered and settled the British Isles. In other words, the Germanic liberty of the early Middle Ages was the precursor to notions of freedom on both the European Continent and in Britain. However, on the Continent by the seventeenth century, the political regimes established by these peoples had in a number of cases degenerated into monarchical absolutism. The most notable place where this did not occur was England. So we need an additional explanation to account for the difference between the political outcome that emerged from the Franks and the Goths on the Continent and their Germanic cousins in Britain. This answer is not hard to find. Indeed, among English and Australian
historians it has long been the standard account -- the English Civil War of the
1640s. As a result of this conflict, the English Parliament emerged as the
principal organ of royal government. From a country teetering on the edge of
absolutism, England eventually produced a constitutional monarchy under which
subjects were guaranteed liberty of person, property and conscience. The
Parliamentarians of the 1640s, I should emphasise, were not revolutionaries.
They were not trying to bring into being a brave new world but to defend their
property and their age-old political rights to bear arms, to hold free
elections, and to speak openly. In preventing their country from succumbing to
absolutism, they were primarily responsible for the modern notions of civil
society, a bill of rights and the social contract. They also enshrined
Protestantism as the dominant religion, but under a system that tolerated other
faiths. By the eighteenth century, English institutions were the envy of
Continental intellectuals. The central argument of the philosophes of the
pre-Revolutionary salons was that England, coupled with the Netherlands,
demonstrated that societies that were freer and more tolerant became both richer
and stronger than those in which oppression and dogmatism prevailed. Both the United States and Australia are the direct heirs of all these
traditions, that is, of both the wider culture of Western Europe that has been
formed since the fall of Rome and of the specific political ideas and
arrangements that emerged in Britain in the seventeenth century. Although the
United States emancipated itself from the direct political control of Britain,
and incorporated elements of both Athenian democracy and the eighteenth century
Enlightenment into its Constitution, the underlying principles of its political
assumptions derive from England, just as ours do. Now, over the past decade, Australia has been through a period of
extraordinary debate in which the option of throwing away our dual
English-speaking and Western inheritance has been taken very seriously. This is
especially so among the political elites, the national news media and the
humanities departments of the higher education system. The argument that
Australia should become an Asian nation, and that we should define ourselves by
our geography, instead of our history and cultural inheritance, is still alive.
Later this year, we are having a referendum over whether we should become a
republic, which is a direct consequence of the earlier debate about whether we
should become an Asian nation. At one stage, this debate reached the point where
it was not only a live internal issue but led some outside observers to believe
that some kind of cultural defection was imminent. In 1996 Samuel Huntington
listed Australia, along with Russia, Turkey and Mexico as one of the 'torn
countries' of the world, by which he meant those countries trying to redefine
their civilizational alignment. He noted that former Prime Minister Paul Keating
was urging that Australia must cease being 'a branch office of empire', become a
republic and aim for 'enmeshment' in Asia. Continued association with Britain,
Keating said, left us a derivative society. It was 'debilitating to our national
culture, our economic future and our destiny in Asia and the Pacific.' [4] Huntington's book was published in 1996 but was written a year or so earlier.
Huntington deserves our admiration because he pulled off an extremely rare feat
in social and political science -- the equivalent of a golfing hole in one. He
made a correct prediction. He said that the attempt by all these 'torn
countries' to change their cultural alignment would fail. This was because
culture was not susceptible to social engineering. Political elites who wanted
to make dramatic shifts of this kind would produce an internal backlash and in
democratic societies they would be forced to retreat. Huntington was right about
this in regard to Turkey, whose attempts to Europeanize its culture produced a
dramatic rise in votes for Muslim fundamentalist political parties. And he was
right about Australia whose attempt to Asianize led to a similar electoral
result by producing a new political party representing what you might call
Australian nationalist fundamentalism. Now, the Keating government was defeated in the election of 1996 -- in fact,
it suffered the biggest electoral reversal of any political party since
federation in 1901. In retrospect, this government appears to have been the high
point of the Australian adventure with this kind of cultural engineering as far
as the political system is concerned. However, it would be wrong to assume this
is the end of the matter, for the question remains alive and well in other
institutions, especially the media and the higher education system. Last night, Professor Véliz made the point that the term 'culture' means
different things in different contexts. This is true. There is the Matthew
Arnold concept of culture as 'the best that has been thought and said'. There is
the notion of culture I have been using to describe the underlying components of
a civilisation, which are the principles enshrined in the political, religious
and economic structures of that civilisation. A civilisation can contain many
sub-cultures, including ethnic cultures. And there is the German romantic notion
of culture devised by Herder, which refers to the whole way of life of a people.
This last view regards Western civilisation as just another culture. As I said
before, Herder's notion is based on cultural relativism and cultural
self-determination, and for two centuries it has provided the rationale for
nationalist conflict, racism and ethnic cleansing. In North America, Western Europe and Australia, the historic track record of
Herder's culture in fostering the most primitive kind of tribalism is today
blithely ignored. In our own societies, cultural relativism and
self-determination remain inviolable, self-validating concepts from which the
aura of innocence still shines. In the eighteenth century, Gibbon, Montesquieu and other members of the skeptical branch of the Enlightenment had made a clear distinction between those societies that had attained the higher plane of civilization and those who languished as barbarians. Herder's cultural relativism, however, would have none of this. There could be no barbarians since all cultures were authentic. Today, there are very few Western historians who dare to use the word "civilization" because of the politically incorrect value judgment embedded within it. As Herder's most recent celebrant, Donald Kelley says: "Herder's point was that in contrast to the civilization of scholars and philosophers, culture could involve the whole people (Kultur des Volkes) and so represented the best road to an understanding not only of history but also of human nature." [5] Within literary criticism, this concept has been steadily gaining ground
throughout this century. In the hands of Marxist critics like Richard Hoggart
and Raymond Williams, the notion of 'authentic culture' was merged with the
concept of class, in order to let them speak of an authentic working class
culture. In history, the search for authentic cultures produced what Edward
Thompson defined in the 1960s as 'history from below' or social history, which
has been the fastest growing branch of the discipline since then. In the 1970s,
these developments merged with the identity group politics and produced the
notion that women, gays, blacks, indigenes or any other identity group could
each be shown to have cultures of their own. The political consequence involved in the identification of so-called authentic cultures is to undermine rather than extend the traditional Western concept of liberalism. The aim of defining identity groups has always been to show how their culture has been forced to take an alien form, that has contributed to the suppression or oppression of their members. For instance, Richard Hoggart argues that the tabloid press and television produce a working class with consumerist values rather than the natural and authentic socialism that would prevail if only the workers could see through the false consciousness imposed by the media. And feminists have long argued that patriarchy suppresses the 'natural' culture of women. In fact, the most recent feminist argument of this kind was in a recent edition of Newsweek where Germaine Greer was urging what was once called female genital mutilation be redefined as female genital 'cutting' and that, despite protests by some Western women critics, the practice should be recognized as an authentic manifestation of the culture of the Muslim women concerned. [6] Another Australian version of the argument from authenticity has been the
case of Aboriginal peoples who are now identified by anthropologists and others
as possessing cultures that are beyond reproach. Though these cultures are
neither liberal, nor democratic nor even literate, their supporters insist that
the cultural assimilation of aboriginal people with Western civilization would
amount to nothing less than genocide. To make an argument of this kind you need to disparage the notion that there are some kinds of universal principles by which human beings should live. Cultural relativism is necessarily opposed to any form of universalism. But in doing so, it conflicts with the basic principles of Western liberalism, that is, with the notion that there is a universal human nature from which flows universal human rights. In other words, multiculturalism is incompatible with liberalism, and thus incompatible with the central political inheritance of Western culture. Our society has always lived with a certain degree of inconsistency and
hypocrisy and history has long taught us that it is better to accept this than
try to impose some intellectually-defined purity of policy. So, although
liberalism entails universalism, this does not mean it should be universally
enforced, nor should the promotion of cultural relativism be proscribed in some
repressive manner. In fact, don't think opposition to the multicultural
romanticism that is now so prevalent within our institutions is actually a
policy or political issue at all, even though it does sometimes produce some
bizarre political manifestations, such as the attempt to make Australia an Asian
nation. The contest is primarily the responsibility of Western intellectuals,
that is, writers, editors, educators, artists and those in the academic
disciplines, and it should be fought out with the tools familiar to people in
these fields -- debate, reason, evidence, rhetoric, ridicule and the like. The biggest failure in this regard at present is the education system,
especially the humanities. This is true of both the high school and the
university curriculum where the hallmarks of multicultural romanticism now
dominate literary criticism, art criticism, anthropology and, sad to say,
history. We are no longer educating our children to even understand western
civilization, let alone value it. Indeed, much of the history curriculum now
constitutes a litany not of western virtues but of western crimes. Among those who designed the new national history standards for American high
schools were educationalists opposed to the traditional notion that history
should be disinterested and above ideology. Fortified by the claim that it is
impossible to be non-political, they advocated a reversal of the traditional
account of American history with its emphasis on the War for Independence, the
making of the Constitution, westward expansion and the Civil War. Instead, they
recommend a high school syllabus that focuses on how women, blacks and ethnic
minorities 'have suffered discrimination, exploitation, and hostility but have
overcome passivity and resignation to challenge their exploiters, fight for
legal rights, resist and cross racial boundaries'. [7] Were it not for the
unprecedented intervention of the Republican-dominated US Senate in November
1994 voting to prevent two government educational bodies from certifying these
national history standards, a program of this kind would now be taught to the
majority of American high school students. In Australia, however, our high school syllabus has succumbed to just this kind of thing. Gender, race and ethnicity are now ubiquitous categories that students are forced to apply to most topics in the humanities. For instance, in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate course in history, it is still possible to study the political and military causes of the First World War, but this is an elective. It is compulsory to study the effect of the war on women at home, such as how they got jobs in the retail sector and how difficult it was under wartime shortages to go shopping. At the university level in Australia, the general story is that history is in
a state of serious decline. There has been a deterioration in student demand to
the point where a large proportion of academic historians have been forced into
what is euphemistically called 'early retirement', that is, they have been
retrenched. The total number of Australian historians employed by universities
declined from 451 in 1989 to less than 300 in 1998, with the number in some of
the once most prestigious departments being reduced by half. [8] Most who have
retired have been those who once emphasised the importance to society of its
political, legal and military arrangements; those who remain are for the most
part multiculturalists, feminists, postmodernists or what are now called queer
theorists. While some older humanities departments are being closed down, the
University of Melbourne only this week announced it had created a new department
of indigenous affairs to be headed by Professor Marcia Langton, one of the
authors of the report into the so-called 'stolen generation' of aboriginal
children. However, even though the appointments system to universities in both Australia and the US is now being blatantly rigged by the Left, this does not mean that governments should intervene to change this, or to sack the perpetrators. Academic freedom is one of the pillars of the civil society that characterises, indeed, defines Western civilisation, and is too important to override. You'd be throwing out the baby etcetera. As I said before, the best weapons are debate, argument and publicity, and for these we need forums both within and without the offending institutions. And on that note, let me thank the organisers of this particular forum for providing these surroundings and this company, which are a good example of how to defend and preserve those civilized values that many of us still prize.
Endnotes
1. Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph
of Anglo-America, Basic Books, New York, 1999. |
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