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6. AMERICA COMES OF AGE

THE RATIONALIZING OF WESTERN CULTURE

CONTENTS

America simply follows an increasingly "rational" Europe

Rousseauian anarchism

The Hegelian dialectic

Darwinism

Nationalism as a rising tribal religion

Marxism / Leninism

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 175-182.
AMERICA SIMPLY FOLLOWS AN INCREASINGLY "RATIONAL" EUROPE

Europe had been in a state of huge turmoil since the days of Christianity's split into Protestant and Catholic variants back in the 1500s.  The early 1600s had seen the European continent turn bloody over this matter.  And in significant ways, America had served for so many as a place of refuge, a way of getting away from all this European turmoil.

And yet European descendants now able to count themselves as Americans never really put the European dynamic behind them.  Europe seemed always to be a place of deeper social introspection, much more sophisticated social debate.  True, as de Tocqueville observed about America, it had its own ideas about life.   But many Americans, especially those of a more philosophical nature – found extensively in the social circles of the rising Progressivists – were greatly attracted to the high level of social thought coming from Europe.  In fact, it was considered to be the height of sophistication to go off to Europe to study (the reverse was hardly the case yet!).  Thus in so many ways, in the realm of higher thought, America mostly found itself simply responding to European developments that were well underway across the Atlantic.

Europe's grand fascination with Human Reason.  Whereas America seemed to be a land of social development through tough encounters with a primitive environment on the part of multitudes of very ordinary people, Europe was a world that prided itself as being based on well-reasoned order, an order maintained by smaller and more select groups of individuals possessing more enlightened minds, found typically at the upper levels of a long-standing feudal order.  Thus it was that by the late 1600s, Europe saw itself as having entered an age of "Enlightened Despotism" – that is, strict rule by "enlightened" monarchs and their small circles of equally enlightened advisors

But of course, the idea of enlightenment was not limited to royal circles.  University-educated intellectuals saw themselves in the same light.  And with the rise of Europe's material prosperity, clearly in place by the 1700s, this self-understanding included also the rising group of industrial entrepreneurs.

This "Age of Enlightenment" had its origins in the early 1600s, with the rise of "natural philosophy" – something we today term as "science."  Very active in this matter were the English Puritans, led by such intellectuals as Francis Bacon, who at the turn of the 1600s celebrated the new discoveries of the workings of the natural world, seeing the hand of an incredibly awesome God in the newly discovered grand designs of nature.  Bacon's "science" was treated as almost an act of worship ... as it would be for so many of the other Puritans – who, for the same reason (seeing their natural philosophy as a witness to the glory of God), took the lead in England's scientific revolution that broke forth in the 1600s.  And much the same was the case for the Puritans' Calvinist cousins over in the Netherlands!

But France seemed to be inspired more by the kind of thinking that René Descartes put forward in the early 1600s, who found in the human mind itself, and its ability to uncover these great new truths, the real object of worship.  Human Reason was a kind of god in itself, worthy of grand respect, and of full confidence in its powers to bring eventually all of life – including man's social life – under rational control.

And the rising field of mathematics, inspired by the Englishman Isaac Newton and the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (later 1600s), seemed merely to confirm such human power.   But Newton also followed the English trend of being more empirical in how he saw such human power brought to reality, believing that nothing could be considered as true until it had been observed to actually work in the real world.  Furthermore, he disappointed many intellectual purists with his wandering into Christian mysticism later in life.[1]

John Locke (also the later 1600s) was clearly a leader in the thinking that Human Reason should be able to design ever-better social foundations and norms.  And by the same logic, he proposed ways to make human thought itself more disciplined, more powerful, in its operation. And as we have already seen, he was invited to put his theories to work in the new Carolina colony, though the results of his efforts were less than spectacular.

[1]No, he had not lost his mind as they claimed, but had simply turned that great mind of his to higher things, things that pure Rationalists or Humanists would never be able to – or be willing to – understand!

ROUSSEAUIAN ANARCHISM

The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was able to take such "progressive" thinking even down a very revolutionary path, when he came up with the notion (well-received through his publication, The Social Contract in 1762) that what was needed to bring the world to true progress was to dismantle the long-standing and quite artificial social structures that Europe had been living under (the Ancien Régime or Old Order of feudal Europe).  This would allow finally "natural man" to rise to a rather instinctive greatness, something that had been lost under the cloud of too much "civilization."

Indeed, Rousseau gave Humanism virtually a religious quality in the way it made true believers of multitudes of intellectuals, individuals that believed persistently that simply tearing down pre-existing social orders would provide the perfect path to human progress.

Obviously, such Humanists were not believers in the Christian doctrine of "original sin," something that took a very dim view of the idea of man's fundamental "purity."   But this doctrine of man's fundamental purity would henceforth stand at the heart of Western Humanism, in the various "anarchist" forms it would take – everything from Communism and Socialism to Wilsonian Democratization.[2]

But the flaws of such Rousseauian thinking should have been made very clear in the way it led the French Revolution down the road to its "Reign of Terror" in 1793-1794, a clarity however that seemed to never reach the eyes of Humanist devotees – who simply refused to learn from the actual examples that history itself provides most amply.  The doctrine was just simply too appealing intellectually and emotionally to be put aside.

[2]In America, such Rousseauian thought would lead American President Wilson to believe that all that was needed to bring the world to democratic perfection was to destroy old social orders under the command of traditional "autocrats" (such as Germany), and beautiful democracy would then automatically blossom forth.  Tragically, he was able to sell this idea to fellow Americans, and led them off to a very bloody and quite pointless war in 1917.

Other American presidents have also taken up the Rousseauian cause, with equally disastrous results:  Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, Carter momentarily vis-à-vis the Shah's Iran; Bush, Jr. in post-9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq; and Obama in Egypt, Syria, and Libya, with his contributions to the very violent "Arab Spring" starting up in 2011.

THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC

However, a German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took a quite different tack concerning the matter of human progress than had Rousseau, seeing, instead of blissful utopia blossoming out of some primitive return to nature, a world more likely shaped by conflict – by even the necessity of conflict.   And Hegel had plenty of evidence of conflict to work with, writing in the years during and after the French Revolution.  But he also saw history as a matter of grand divine design, directed by the hand of God itself, a great World Spirit (Weltgeist) that used the natural instinct of man, not towards harmony but instead towards competition and conflict, as the driving dynamic that moved history forward. He claimed that each period in history was the by-product of a conflict between two social tendencies in competition at the time, which in their struggles actually birthed yet a new and higher social form which then took them into the next historical period.  He thus saw history as the result of a dialectical process, two (di) forces giving rise to a new and more progressive third force through their struggles.

And just as Rousseau was to have a huge impact in Europe's mid-to-late 1700s, so too Hegel was to have a similar impact in Europe's 1800s (pretty much the whole century), tending to move European philosophy down the line of thought that it was in the dynamic of the struggle or competition for dominance in life that life itself took its particular shape in history.  Both Darwinism and Marxism would be shaped strongly by this line of thought.  But so would be even the rising realm of a tribal-like nationalism that was shaking Europe as it moved into the 1800s.

DARWINISM

The British themselves had remained very pragmatic in the face of the Rousseauian Idealism going on in continental Europe.  The Scotsman David Hume, for instance, made it quite clear that it was most unwise to accept anything as True that had not proved itself on numerous occasions as the way things happened by their very nature.  There was no room for fancy speculation on such matters for Hume.  Nor for that matter was it the case for the fellow Scotsman Adam Smith, who studied carefully various societies in order to derive what seemed to be the actual rules of economics – published as his famous Wealth of Nations (1776), nor for the Irishman Edmund Burke, who took the French Rationalists to task in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

But it would be the Englishman, Charles Darwin, who would put in place the idea that serious geological and biological research, such as he conducted during a five-year voyage around the world (1831-1836), was the real source of Truth, one which produced a very different picture of the dynamics of life than Humanism.

In this, he was following up on the earlier works of his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who in his Zoonomia (1796) had explain the role of nature's very competitive process, which created slow specie progress through what would eventually come to be termed "natural selection" or – more crudely (thanks to Darwin's colleague, Herbert Spencer) – "survival of the fittest."

This also followed closely the political thoughts of the British Whig Party, supported by rising entrepreneurs, who justified (thanks also to the earlier works of the English clergyman Robert Malthus and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) their growing economic power ... and the social cruelties it created as a side-effect of the industrial revolution that England was experiencing at the time.  They justified such social cruelty (casting the weak aside) as being simply nature's own very competitive way in which it achieved real progress historically.

Thus Charles Darwin's contribution was to "prove" this line of thought through his extensive research, finally published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.  He then expanded on this idea in his Descent of Man (1871) ... explaining how man himself was not created in full or modern form at the beginning of Creation – such as the Biblical account given in the opening chapters of Genesis states as being the case.  Instead, man had evolved very slowly over the ages from a very early primate stage (the famous Darwinian "monkey"), through multiple specie changes, in order to finally become contemporary man.

This seemed to be a very compelling explanation of man's own origins, compelling enough for numerous intellectuals to put aside Biblical notions as completely unscientific, and thus to be disregarded completely.  The Christian world was shocked.

NATIONALISM AS A RISING TRIBAL RELIGION

When Napoleon unleashed his fired-up French citizen-soldiers against the professional armies of Europe's monarchs, he ran right over the opposition.  But he also fired up the peasants of those countries, when the monarchs had to call on their own people, and not just their private armies, to save their thrones.  And with this, a huge spirit of "nationalism" was born, actually unleashed!

And it would be a very emotionally charged force for these monarchs to deal with.  With popular participation in the defense of the lands went the demand for participation in the politics of those lands as well.  Thus something akin to "democracy" began to stir, something that the monarchs were quite leery of, having watched what such "democracy" had done to France in its 1789 overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy that had long-directed that country.

But it was a time of a kind of a "Romantic" stirring that also accompanied this new political awakening of the European continent's commoners.   In Germany, divided into hundreds of small states, the hunger to see an actual German "nation" arise out of the political chaos was deepened by the poetry and writings of such Germans as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, who, in the 1770s, even prior to the French Revolution, helped birth the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Drive) movement pushing for German national development.  Indeed, this political-intellectual hunger stirring in Germany ended up, over the course of 1800s, not only bringing to life various revolutionary movements in Germany (such as the partially-successful Revolution of 1848) but also making German scholarship a leading force in a more broad intellectual awakening that reached deep into European society, and made German scholarship one of the leading forces of 19th century Europe.

And eventually this romantic hunger in Germany would find its fulfillment in the skillfully played war with neighboring France in 1870, which stampeded all these smaller German states unto a single German Bund or Federation under the direction of Prussia's brilliant Prince Otto von Bismarck!

In fact, this same thing was happening all across Europe at the time, as everyone, from Norwegians in the North to Italians in the South and Russians in the East to Irish in the West, began their march towards their "national destinies."

But it was more like a revival of the tribalism that Charlemagne's feudalism 1200 years earlier had put an end to, with his feudal restructuring of European society, placing Europe under long-standing ruling classes and their dynastic masters.

But where was it headed?  And who was managing this unleashed force, so that things did not get out of hand?

Tragically, the "Great War" of 1914-1918 (World War One), which bled Europe of a whole generation of young men, made it clear that no one was really able to bring this national-tribal impulse under some kind of civilized management once it was unleashed.  Not even American President Woodrow Wilson, who thought (very incorrectly) that he had the answer to the whole matter.

MARXISM / LENINISM

Another individual who believed that he had the proper answer to this growing nationalist impulse was Karl Marx, who did not like the lines that nationalism was taking.  Like Wilson, who believed that democratic constitutions following the American model (although personally Wilson even preferred the British model) were the proper path to a glorious future, Marx was convinced that it was through a carefully managed industrial-class revolution that the future was best met.  And he did his best, Darwin-style (he was a big supporter of Darwin) to prove through his own historical research presented in his 1867 publication, Das Kapital, the iron laws of social development, development determined by the dialectic of class conflict – conflict among the various social classes that emerged historically as a result of the deep changes in economic structuring that occurred over the span of history.

And Marx was certain that the recent Industrial Revolution that was clearly unfolding in Europe was the true millennium that others (such as the Christian world, which Marx did not approve of either) saw headed their way in history.  To Marx, the rising of the industrial working class or "proletariat" against the grip of the "capitalist" owners of Europe's new industries would bring history to its final developmental stage., sort of putting some kind of completion to all historical development.

Thus was born Marxist Socialism's own quite Romantic offering – actually even something of a religious offering (like Europe's "nationalism" and Wilson's "democracy") to the masses.  All they needed to do was to follow Marx's advice, and rise up against their capitalist oppressors.  And voilà, then would automatically follow a "natural" movement of modern society into its final, utopian stage – some kind of workers' democracy.

But the Russian intellectual, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, popularly known simply as "Lenin," was not as certain that the Marxist utopia would come into being of its own accord simply through spontaneous revolutionary action on the part of Europe's industrial workers.  Especially when it came to Russia – where the industrial revolution had only recently got underway, and  thus was hardly "ripe for revolution" – Lenin took up the political line of thought that a workers' revolution was going to need quite a bit of help from political specialists, intellectuals (principally himself and his fellow Bolshevik Party leaders) to take the initiative on the part of the largely undeveloped Russian industrial working class and conduct Marxist revolution for them, in other words, a "people's revolution" carefully directed by this small Leninist group serving as the "vanguard" of the industrial proletariat.

But it would not be until the midst of the Great War, and all of its bloody havoc – and the way it simply broke down all sense of political authority – that Lenin would have the opportunity to put his ideas into action in Russia.  And in doing so, he would plunge the country into a civil war lasting into the early 1920s ... killing more Russians than had even the terrible war they dropped out of in early 1918 in order to conduct this proletarian revolution.

The world, which finally was able to pull out of the horrible nationalist slaughter of World War One in late 1918, was forced to look on in horror as the bloodletting continued, actually worsening, in Russia.  It was all such a sickening – and frightening – sight.

Europe vowed that never again would it allow itself to get caught up in such political hysteria.   Nice resolve.  Too bad it did not last very long.



Go on to the next section:  American Progressivism

  Miles H. Hodges