Sunday Night Journal — February 20, 2011

The January issue of The New Criterion includes a symposium called “The Anglosphere and the future of liberty.” It’s been on my mind a good deal since the issue arrived some weeks ago.

“The Anglosphere,” in case you haven’t encountered the term, refers to the English-speaking world, to all the nations which have their political roots and some significant cultural roots in England, even if the connection began with conquest. It includes, obviously, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, and a good many other former colonies of the British Empire. The broad thesis of the symposium can be summed up in this sentence from Mark Steyn’s contribution, “Dependence Day”:

We are coming to the end of a two-century Anglosphere dominance, and of a world whose order and prosperity many people think of as part of a broad, general trend but which in fact derive from a particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it.

What we call the modern world, say the contributors, has been in very large part shaped by the combination of constitutional government, technological innovation, and capitalism which is particularly characteristic of the English-speaking nations. That’s a very broad statement, and one can immediately begin a list of contributions toward that sort of development which came from other peoples, and of nations which have adopted the general pattern at least as successfully. But it does strike me as a defensible generalization. (If you broaden the category from the Anglosphere to include the Nordic countries, it’s even more defensible, and if you make it Europe and nations rooted in Europe, it doesn’t even need much qualification.) As Steyn says, “We forget how rare on this earth is peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere.”

Steyn is a polemicist, and I don’t agree with everything he says in his piece. He includes a few overly-simplisitic or sensational jibes, and in general is certainly not concerned with doing justice to the opposing case. But he raises a serious and important question. Granting that his characterization of the Anglosphere’s role in making the modern world is at least a defensible generalization, what will happen if those nations become incapable and/or unwilling to do and to be what they have been? We have seen in the last two centuries a continuing trend toward the recognition of individual rights, the rule of law, and representative government. Most of us consider that to be progress, whether or not we applaud every aspect of modernity, although like any form of progress it has its defects and proceeds in a zig-zag way, not in a straight line, with rights gained here and lost there. And sometimes, as is particularly the case in the U.S. and Great Britain now, it becomes cancerous, so that the right to vote becomes the same thing as the right to paint a butterfly on your cheek which becomes the same thing as making pornography. Steyn notes a case which represents the reductio ad absurdum of this, in which the government of the U.K. paid for a man with learning disabilities to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute—because, of course, he had a right to sex. (Why he had not been able to procure it on his own was not made clear.)

But what struck me most from Steyn’s piece, and has been most on my mind, is this: “...you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequences.”

It is typically those who argue for the institution of a sort of extreme version of human rights, which involves not so much liberty of action as the equation of liberty with the satisfaction of all wants and the duty of the state to provide it, who are least respectful of the actual history and traditions of human rights as understood in the Anglosphere. They tend to see history as a parade of injustices: the most notable features of the history of the United States, for instance, are slavery and the crushing of the Indians. They are far more ashamed than proud of the civilization that produced them, and they see themselves as standing apart from it. They tend to see the Anglosphere’s tradition of liberty and law as a sort of scam designed to preserve the power and possessions of the ruling class. Their rhetoric generally seems more that of rebels seeking to overthrow an oppressor than of citizens seeking the improvement of an order of which they are members and inheritors.

The inheritors, and also the beneficiaries: it is no secret that over the past several decades many of these quasi-revolutionaries have found themselves very comfortably situated in the academy, in the entertainment industry, in journalism, and in government. Especially in the first two of these, they exercise influence far greater than would be suggested by their numbers. And they’ve had a fair amount of success: it’s now quite common to hear people of no particular sense or education toss off secular-leftist platitudes as readily as others might say “God bless America!”

Well, all this is pretty well-known, and I’m pretty sure I’m repeating things I’ve said before. But I’ve been thinking about it in relation to Stein’s “profound consequences.” There’s a disconnect between the vision of the radical critics, which holds their civilization to be fundamentally corrupt—racist, imperialist, sexist, etc.—and their complacency about their own position in it. They act as if their own prosperity, security, and liberty have no connection to the history of the country that produced them—as if it had just somehow appeared, a pure product of nature like rain and sunlight, to which they have a natural right. There is sometimes, at least in the younger sort of radical, a sense of guilt about this, but it appears to diminish with age, perhaps still making itself felt but being directed outward, resulting in an intensification of the critique.

Moreover, there is an assumption that they can continue to propagate the idea that contemporary Western prosperity, security, and liberty are the fruit of a poisonous root which must be yanked out of the ground and destroyed, and yet continue to enjoy those same fruits. Well, it doesn’t work that way with plants, and I don’t think it works that way with societies, either.

Maybe this is partly just a swing of the pendulum, a needed correction to the natural tendency of any nation or culture to ignore the dark side of its own history. I’d like to think so. And I should note that I’m speaking in worldly terms here. From the most important point of view, that of the spiritual fate of mankind, it is certainly arguable that the worldly goods which the Anglosphere has excelled in procuring are serving now to pull people in the direction of hell. If so, then it will be a good thing if we lose them. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about what that will mean.

What if the broad order of which Steyn speaks really is by and large the work of the Anglosphere, and its internal critics succeed in demoralizing it to the point where its best institutions are no longer respected and cultivated? Take a good look at most of the rest of the world, and ask yourself if you really want to make Euro-American societies more like it. This doesn’t mean that we have nothing to learn from the rest of the world—quite the opposite is true—but I think most of us, even the more alienated, really would prefer to keep our basic institutions. Certainly there is no substantial migration out of Europe, America, Australia, et.al. And those institutions are in turn dependent on a huge number of cultural habits and presumptions, ways of thinking that have roots in Europe generally and in the Anglosphere specifically. Our idea of citizenship, for instance, is by no means a feature of all societies. It is under attack in many ways, of which the radical critique is only one—self-indulgence, aka consumerism, is another—but without it our representative institutions will inevitably fail.

Sometime in the late ‘70s or so, when the economy was looking bad and the Reagan-era reaction against government social programs was beginning, someone (perhaps Reagan himself), speaking of the capitalist economy as the goose that laid golden eggs, observed that it was time to stop arguing about how to divide up the eggs and start worrying about the health of the goose. Something similar might be said now about our political health and stability, upon which so much else depends: it’s time to stop arguing about who is going to get the best rooms in the house, and start worrying about the cracks in the foundation and the leaks in the roof.

In my view what the Anglosphere requires for its renewal can only be provided by the Catholic Church. But that’s another topic.