|
War, liberalism, and the future
I just finished reading Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. The point of the book is that the West — Greece, Rome, and the societies founded on the ruins of the Roman Empire — has always been superior militarily because of a Western way of war that emphasizes decisive shock battle by citizen soldiers, and a Western mode of civic life that emphasizes individual rights, consent, free speech and rationalism. It’s a useful book for understanding the strength of some of the trends that have favored liberalism, and the reasons many have had for making a firm distinction between pre-welfare state liberalism and its degenerate successor. The civic life characteristic of the West has been admirable. It has also involved a difficult balance between individual freedom and judgment on the one hand, and common principles of moral and spiritual order on the other. Freedom and openness can’t be absolute because they depend on an order they can’t of themselves generate. In classical antiquity not all were citizens, and prosecutions for impiety were common. Since then, and until very recently, religious establishments and narrow national and class boundaries have been usual in the West. The creation of civic order on a very large scale — the rise of large nation states — in Northern and Western Europe was accompanied by the creation of national churches, religious persecutions, and expulsions of Jews. In America, where the land is vast, there’s been no formal religious establishment since the 1840s, and the force of tradition has been comparatively weak, we’ve gotten by with conformism and (until recently) racism and an informal establishment of moralistic nondenominational Protestantism. Now, of course, all bigotries are to be done away with. Freedom
and openness are to become not attributes but the very substance of
social order. It’s altogether unlikely such a goal can be achieved, and
VFR has chronicled the contradictions of attempts to do so.
An issue Hanson’s book raises is the ultimate effect of such
developments on military power. The attempt to make freedom, equality and rationalism absolute destroys those things in the form in which they can actually exist, and in which (Hanson tells us) they have been essential to Western military success. Will the Army go the way of NASA? TV
images, and Norman Mailer’s contention that the purpose of the Iraq war
was to display the continuing competence of white males, suggest it has
not yet done so. Something of the spirit of the Republic survived in the
Roman army long after it had died elsewhere. Do we have something
similar to look forward to? The best solution to the problem of freedom
and order would be sort of quasi-medieval combination of
federalism and localism with an established religion. We’re unlikely
to get that, though, and may have to settle for a combination of
militarized chaos and PC ideology. Comments
“Freedom and openness are to become not attributes but the very substance of social order.” That’s a good description of the difference between the older and the contemporary liberalism. “… the reasons many have had for making a firm distinction between pre-welfare state liberalism and its degenerate successor.” Is Mr. Kalb suggesting that he agrees with that distinction? I thought his view was that there was no fundamental difference. “The creation of civic order on a very large scale the rise of large nation states in Northern and Western Europe was accompanied by … expulsions of Jews.” This implies a direct correlation or causal relationship between expulsion of Jews and rise of large nation-states. I think that’s overstated. There were expulsions of Jews at some times and toleration at others. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 4, 2003 12:09 PM“[U]nderstanding … the reasons many have had for making a firm distinction between pre- welfare state liberalism and its degenerate successor” is not the same as thinking the distinction stands up. It seems to me that liberalism is defined by the theoretical refusal to make freedom subordinate to anything more substantive than civic order. Once that border’s been crossed the rest is working out the details. By the year 1500 there were no Jews legally present in the advanced European states bordering on the Atlantic. Shortly after that the Protestant Reformation — the break with Rome and consequent nationalization of religion — began. I do think both those things (along with e.g. the claimed liberties of the Gallican Church) are related to the attempt to create a public civic order on a very large though not universal scale. Posted by: Jim Kalb on June 4, 2003 1:06 PMImmediately after submitting the above comment I received a notice of a book dealing with religious intolerance and the rise of the nation state: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195154827/darwinanddarwini Perhaps by luck, the book supports my position. Posted by: Jim Kalb on June 4, 2003 1:15 PM“By the year 1500 there were no Jews legally present in the advanced European states bordering on the Atlantic. Shortly after that the Protestant Reformation … began. “ Well, this same fact could also be taken to mean that it was the removal of the Jews from Northern Europe that set the stage for the Reformation and the ruin of Catholic Christendom. :-) Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 4, 2003 1:37 PMMr. Auster wrote an article a while back entitled “Liberalism as the Cause of Anti-Semitism”. Maybe it should be the other way around :-). Also, the Jews were expelled from England by Edward the First in 1290. 1290 is the end of the Thirteenth Century. According to my readings of Catholic authors such as Belloc, the High Middle Ages consisted of the 11th through the 13th centuries, with the 13th century as the absolute peak. Thereafter it declined somewhat. The 14th century was calamitous for Christendom in a variety of ways. So, while the Jews were residing in England, Christendom reached its civilizational height; then the Jews were expelled from England, and Christendom began an immediate civilizational decline. I’m not saying there was a causal relationship between the two sets of phenomena, by the way. :-) Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 4, 2003 1:59 PMThe creation of civic order on a very large scale the rise of large nation states in Northern and Western Europe was accompanied by expulsions of Jews. I haven’t done the reading on this, but here are a few more exceptions to this thesis that come to mind. Edward the First expelled England’s tiny Jewish population of 4,000 Jews in 1290. Apart from the question of what connection there could be between expulsion of such a tiny group and any larger political developments, can we say that England was in fact becoming a large nation-state at just that time? Yes, in the sense that over the following century, the long rift between Saxon and Norman was finally erased with the beginning of the Hundred Years War; England became more unified linguistically as well. But can we say thereby that the period around 1290 was when England became a large nation-state? Jews were expelled from France in 1394. I suppose one could say that France became a unified country in the following century under the leadership of Joan of Arc fighting the English invaders. But is that when France really became a nation? I’m not sure. I thought that in their own self-understanding, they were a kingdom, not a nation. It was as a kingdom that the strong unification and centralization of France began under Louis XIII in the early 17th century. France didn’t think of itself as a unified “nation” until the French Revolution, but at that period there were again Jews in France. Finally, Germany did not become a large nation-state until the 19th century, when there were many Jews in Germany. So this thesis needs some more fleshing out. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 6, 2003 7:15 PM |