| Thursday, August 15, 2002 |
19:51 - First the Earth cooled...
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When the New World was discovered, it changed everything. ("Well, duh," you say.) Not in any concretely tangible way on the popular level, though, or even in a way that the leaders of the various nations in power at the time could really sense. It was an asteroid strike, a cataclysm in history that sent shock waves around the planet and back numerous times, and we're still feeling the tremors today.
There it was-- a huge landmass full of natural resources, whose only inhabitants were so primitive technologically compared to the Europeans that they may as well have not been there, for all the global importance anybody was willing to ascribe to them-- to any extent beyond trying to get control of the natural resources from them by words rather than by swords. Every seafaring nation struck out and planted its flags, from the jungles of Brazil and Central America to the ice-bound shores of Newfoundland; and by the luck of the draw, the ships from England managed to land on the part of the Americas that happened to be the best and most livable. This ensured that the people who would come to inhabit that region would be predominantly English-speaking WASPs, if you didn't count the slaves in the southern colonies.
Maybe it was something about the fact that the English colonies were among the first to be founded by corporations-- privately held companies under contract from the Crown to settle the land, raise crops, harvest natural resources, and make products to ship back to the mother country-- instead of by military force or bodies directly under the control of the monarchy. But there was something in the political climate of England at the time, and in its colonies, that made it so that when it came time to break free of the control of the monarchy of the mother country, as every colony in the Americas eventually did, it was a group of intellectuals with some freaky ideas about how government should work that happened to lead the charge. These people were highly placed in their various jobs and political connections, and whatever they'd been reading or smoking, they somehow came to the conclusion that instead of setting up a monarchy of their own after they won independence, the thing to do would be to experiment with federalism. They had the landmass for a distributed method of government to make sense; they had the colonial delineations which they'd inherited from the various colonial contract corporations, which gave them a convenient substrate for "State" governments. And given their recent experiences with the British crown and how it could act when it got its knickers twisted at them, they decided that the answer was to centralize in the federal government only those functions which it was exclusively a central government's business to accomplish. Anything that could be handled by the lower-level and more distributed governmental bodies, would be. States were more important than the federal government, and local jurisdictions were more important than State, and individual people had the most power of all, to the extent that they did not break laws that were universally agreed to by any of the higher levels.
What would it have been like if, instead of trying to wrestle the American colonies back under the control of the British monarchy, England had undergone its own peaceful revolution and adopted a democratic or federal form of government? Monarchies don't like to give up power, and whenever a crown has given way to a democracy in other countries since 1776, it's tended to stick around as a figurehead, clinging to the romance of past glory. It's not an easy thing to give up. Democracy is colder, more clinical. No matter how neoclassical the architecture on the government buildings, it's still a rule by reason, rather than by emotion. In many ways that's a good thing. But for the sake of national pride, it's and ugly, dirty thing. But a democratic England, with its American States across the pond, might well have become an undisputed superpower long before the 20th century.
But as it was, America was out to an early lead. Its form of government encouraged individuality and innovation, and scientific advancements were to be had almost immediately. America began its push westward. It soon became obvious that there was a vast amount of eminently livable land out there, much more temperate and pleasant than anywhere else in the Americas-- one would think it was made to be settled. And it had all kinds of natural resources. Gold and silver and bauxite and iron and everything else started flowing from the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, and immigrants rushed in from all over the world to get in on the ground floor. It was a dot-com boom whose scale dwarfs the one we've just lived through. It changed the face of nations. Not least our own-- after all, we had all that land to settle, but there were all those Indians. We did try to get the land from them as legally and as compassionately as possible; but because of overzealous cavalry, corrupt state and territorial governors, and a federal government run by Presidents like Andrew Jackson who cared little for such pussyfoot concepts as "respect for other cultures, particularly those who are at a disadvantage", it wasn't much use trying to keep things equitable. The technological difference between the two classes of people was just so immense that even if today's EU were doing the colonizing, they'd have been unable to keep themselves from flowing into those wide open spaces and taking home the riches they found there, culturally-different-concepts-of-land-ownership be damned. It was like living next to a house full of gold coins, guarded by a Corgi. Nobody is so idealistic as to just leave it be. Particularly not when you're trying to fight a Civil War and you've just invented the telegraph and the locomotive.
Because it was in America that scientific and technological innovation really took root. Because the original federalists had carefully kept religion out of the laws, they ensured that the land would be ruled in a manner than fostered scientific thought founded on practical principles; and with the best and the brightest of so many countries emigrating to the US, it's small wonder that we produced Edison and then Hollywood in such quick order, or petroleum and then Henry Ford. America was a runaway success; everyone wanted to be an American. And well before World War I, the European nations who had begotten America and given her so many expatriates with which to populate the country realized that they were in no small danger of being eclipsed.
So it was that certain megalomaniacal figures in Europe picked up on the newfound fervor for science that had been propounded by folks like Darwin, and the work of the researchers who had figured out how bacteria multiply, and the idea that nations-- national identities-- would ideally behave just like animals in nature would, obeying rules like survival-of-the-fittest. All they need is "room to grow". And while by this time most of the European nations had had their own revolutions (peaceful and otherwise) to put parliamentary democracies into place, there was still that ever-present romance of the Nation, the People-- the Chosen Land.
So when Hitler began to hitle, he did so with the idea in mind that a nation derives its strength from its national identity (easily fomentable through ideas like "racial purity" and "bloodlines" and convenient ethnic scapegoats to blame for any problems), and a strong nation with lots of room to grow could quickly rise to supremacy. America had the latter, but surely a country built on such a mishmash of different peoples with different languages and different aspirations couldn't be as strong as a people with a pure national identity. (And besides, Germany needed a pick-me-up after the humiliating WWI reparations imposed by the French.) So up comes the Ubermensch, and down go the Jews. Out come the guns, and they're trained eastward on a march toward Russia, and south toward Africa and South America-- "room to grow" indeed.
The trouble with that, naturally, was that Russia-- while it looked like America in a lot of ways, what with its artificial and brand-new-for-the-time political system and its vast spread of wide open spaces full of natural resources-- actually had a terrible climate and a low-tech populace that wasn't growing very much. Germany wouldn't have found Siberia to have made much of an agar tray for the Pure Aryan Nation to prosper, any more than the Soviet Union did.
Incidentally, communism will likely not amount to much in history but a freaky political experiment that failed-- except for a few side effects that have woven themselves into the tapestry of our shared experience. The Soviet Union was founded on the same sort of jealousy that Nazi Germany arose under: that America was successful because it had tried something new, and they'd had the wide open spaces with which to support it. But surely the American federalist/capitalist idea couldn't be the last, right one, could it? Naah. Lenin and Stalin were revolutionary intellectuals trying to reinvent government in the same way that our founding fathers did, only they took it a lot farther down the road of artificial machine-like "empowerment" of the individual-- it empowered them so much they were divested of all ability to act on their own behalf, rather than as part of a group. But they also brought a special kind of pigheadedness to the table-- a grumbling, stomping determination to succeed in spite of the lack of all those natural advantages that those English-derived American colonists had. The Soviets would beat the Americans to the pinnacle of military might, come hell or high water.
(Except that just because a political idea is nearly 200 years old doesn't make it wrong or obsolete. Sometimes the first idea we come up with actually just happens to be right. Just as the Desktop metaphor is still the most widely-used, most intuitive set of paradigms for operating systems that we've come up with-- even in the face of more recent developments that purport to be more post-modern and user-friendly, like Microsoft Bob and the Netscape "Webtop". But people don't like to accept that such an old idea can be the best one for the job, and they keep trying new things-- which is a good thing, indeed. But it reminds me of nothing so much as those cartoons where one character gets hit in the head, and then spends the next 22 minutes having hilarious amnesiac misadventures; finally, someone thinks, "Hey! All we have to do is hit him in the head again, and he'll get his memory back!" And of course it works. But you know, in the real world, lightning rarely strikes twice.)
And the result of all this was that the European, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations, post-WWII, found themselves reduced to the roles of pawns between America and the USSR-- NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The once-proud empires had dwindled to the role of allies who could be bought and sold, who represented the ebb and flow of balanced power. And as America's might continued to grow, following the same old ideals that they'd been following since Andrew Jackson, the USSR ran out of steam and collapsed in on itself. The Warsaw Pact dissolved. NATO lost its common foe and focus. And suddenly the European powers found themselves ready to self-determine again; except that by this time, they didn't have any say in world issues anymore. They'd been defined in opposition to or in alliance with either the Americans or the Russians for so long, and America had been building itself up to match the perceived thread of the USSR for so long, that from a global-influence standpoint the Europeans felt about as confident facing down the juggernaut across the Atlantic as the Indians did when they heard the hoofbeats of the US Cavalry.
So there's that: powerlessness. But there's also the issue of the Jews-- the people who as the war ended had emerged blinking from the concentration camps, those who were left, and were immediately given a homeland by the League of Nations-- soon to become the UN-- as one of their few decisively positive pieces of legislation. Although we can see right there the seeds of today's assumption, in the "transnational progressivism" camp that Steven den Beste has been covering lately with some asperity, that with victimhood comes entitlement. And it's amazing how quickly the UN and the European community changed its tune when Israel stopped being a nation of poor, poor victims and started acting like winners: making the desert bloom, developing a high-tech sector that's the envy even of Silicon Valley in many ways, de-socializing to an amazing degree, and fighting off the repeated attempts by the surrounding Arab nations to drive them into the sea (e.g. in 1967, when Israel foiled a coalition that was revving its engines for war, and responded by taking over the territories in which they're now being blown up in ice-cream parlors and on city buses by people who would far rather die as holy martyrs than live in what they consider "slavery"-- which in reality amounts to "having to live next to a country of Jews and McDonald's and Nikes and MTV"). Now that Israel looks like the oppressor, the poor innocent Palestinians are obviously the victims, and they must be given the same entitlements that the League of Nations felt compelled to give the Holocaust survivors back in 1947.
For a half-century now, Germany has been falling all over itself trying to distance itself from any suggestion that they had once been the instrument of Hitler's grand dreams. For the first few post-war decades, they were humble about it-- they had to be, after all. They were a defeated nation, occupied, divided like spoils of war. But now that they're again the strongest nation in Europe, economically rather than militarily, they're throwing their weight around again-- they have the answer and the solution, and it remains only to convince the rest of the world (read: us) of it. Sure, they decry the actions of Hitler in the strongest possible terms, and they praise the Americans for saving the German people from themselves. But now they're overcompensating. They're overcompensating something fierce.
Now the big fad is to take aim at America and at Israel-- the big winners of history, the ones whose ingenuity and innovation and dumb luck have netted them great individual happiness for all their people, at the perceived expense of billions of downtrodden peasantry worldwide-- and to use whatever words those oppressors use to describe their enemies ("terrorism", "war crimes", "rogue nation", "fascism"), and turn them back against America and Israel themselves. Oh, how delicious the irony! America is a superpower with weapons of mass destruction; they have strong national identity (= Nazi!); they overrun and set up puppet regimes in nations with which they find coexistence to be untenable (Afghanistan); they propose to unleash their arsenal at any nation who appears to be threatening their own hegemony, whether the rest of the world agrees that such action is warranted or even permissible or not (Iraq). Next to such a nation, could a nuke-armed Iraq be so bad?
I've just had the (dis)pleasure of reading a spate of discussion on a Usenet group which I peruse on occasion, one which tends to be inhabited by people whose positions in life would place them firmly on the far left: socially insecure, sexually liberated, racially diverse (indeed, completely abstracted in their own minds from any real-life physical differences between themselves at all), troglodytic, and in constant contact with friends from all over the world-- with whom they're far more familiar than the world outside their own front doors. I've heard the most amazing things come out of these people's fingers. "Iraq armed with a nuke would take out those terrorist thugs in charge of Israel, and maybe the US too-- and then we'd have a real free democracy running things! It certainly can't be any worse than what we have now," said one (though this is a paraphrase). "God bless George Galloway for having the balls to listen to what Saddam Hussein has to say, and to tell the USA that they're going way too far." And "Civilian casualties aren't just 'unavoidable', as Dubya calls them, but they're held up like a trophy by the warmongers in power-- just like at Hiroshima, they live for nothing else but to flatten whole cities full of innocent women and children who want nothing more than to live and work and play like any family man in Minneapolis with a toddler and a dog." And "Considering that Iraq is right at the top of that leaked 'potential nuke targets' list, doesn't it seem as though the 'War on Terror' is more frightening than the Terror itself?"
That last one is in fact a direct quote, more or less. And as hard as it is for me to force myself to remember this, we get so caught up in our blogging that we forget that most people in this country (and in the world-- the people who were spouting the lines I quoted above seemed to be Canadians and Germans) take very little interest in what facts are out there and what dangers the world presents, beyond what their own personal prejudices happen to be and the news items that happen to bolster those prejudices. It's amazing the number of sentiments I read that seemed to amount to little more than "Oh, why can't we all just live in a world where nobody has to raise a weapon in anger?"
Dude, I'd love to live in that kind of world too. But we don't. More's the pity. And even simpering about "root causes" isn't going to turn back the clock and raise the WTC again and turn the Arab world into a land of whimsy and light where women can run free in the streets.
The "root causes" of the situation in which we find ourselves can be traced back as far as you like: not just to Saudi oil, not just to the Gulf War, not just to the foundation of Israel, not just to WWII, not just to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, not just to the end of British colonial rule, not just to the writing of the Declaration of Independence. It goes back through direct and indirect causality to the leaders and inhabitants of a monarchial Europe bursting with technological might and a need for hegemony, sending out their ships looking for the means by which to become leaders in the real New World-- the World of Economics. The New World of America was just a discovery along the way to that road-- what was really the killer app of the day was the stock market, speculation, futures trading, promissory notes, short-selling, and bubbles-- all flowing through Antwerp, all creating a new kind of wealth for an empowered middle merchant class. If this is the "root cause" that someone wants to attack, be my guest. But taking on anything that occurred later in history is futile, because there's always something further back to blame for it. You can, if you like, consider the repulsion of Saladin and the Crusades to be germane to today's woes, or the foundations of Islam and Christianity, or the removal of the seat of the Roman Empire to Byzantium, or whatever. None of these events occurred in a vacuum. Everything had consequences that we feel echoing today.
We live in Reality Land here. It would be nice if the only place we saw people who wanted to kill us was in video games, but the real world isn't like that. And yes, America is a powerful behemoth, more powerful than the rest of the former superpowers of the world put together. But you know something? If you look through history, from 1776 on through the present day, do you know the only constant-- the only nation which has not fundamentally altered or reinvented itself, or swung from one end of the pendulum to the other, or had a bloody revolution, or faded into irrelevance, or killed millions of its own people as "dissidents", or indeed violated its own founding principles in any significant way?
I don't feel as though I'm beholden to anybody to feel guilty for being an American. I like this country. I know it has its faults, and I know everybody thinks of us as being the Microsoft of nations-- bulldozing our way through everybody else's culture without so much as a backwards glance. I know the transnational progressivists would like nothing more than to invent its own set of "monopoly crimes" with which to charge us, and perhaps split us up so we don't present so much of a threat to the rest of the world's ability to survive and be happy. But there's a difference here: I'm proud of the achievements of this country, in a way that I can't imagine being proud of being a part of Microsoft. We are what we are because we had a grand vision 226 years ago, and we've innovated our way to the top and vindicated that vision through our own individual accomplishments. We haven't won because we stifled competition from other countries; we've won because we did things right. Sure, I can see why other countries may well dislike or even hate us for that. I can understand what it must be like to be perpetually in someone else's shadow. But I don't buy the proposition that we're subject to punishment for our success.
No, I don't have a grand unified theory for how the world can be united in peace and brotherhood, or how the benefits of life in the USA can be conferred upon the rest of the world. (If I did, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this blog.)
But we've done everything right that I can reasonably see being done right, and history has handed us the laurels of world domination.
I personally think the world could have done far worse.
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