In a previous life, I had the dubious pleasure of spending inordinate amounts of time bumping along the muddy back roads of Andean Peru. This gave me ample opportunity to think deep thoughts, one of which was, “What makes the United States such a creative society?” One day while sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop in Lima I looked around the square to find a modern artefact of life that was demonstrably Peruvian rather than American. I could find none. And I knew that I would come to the same conclusion if I sat in a Starbucks in Canada. On a later trip into the Tien Shen Mountains in Kyrgyzstan, we passed a Coca Cola sign and I wondered about those blasted Americans.
I believe that history is largely the story of how one group abused another group. But occasionally, there is a redemption. What do I mean? In the movie “Saving Private Ryan” there is a wonderful scene in which the elderly Private Ryan stands up from the grave of one of his battlefield rescuers, turns to his wife and pleads with tears, “Tell me I was worth it!” Decades before, during World War II, a platoon of soldiers had died to save him, and he wanted to be assured that his subsequent life had been worth their spilt blood. It is a great story of redemption. In fact, I sometimes think that all great stories are, at heart, stories of redemption in which something is restored by the sacrifice of a third party.
In wondering how we broke free from the tyranny of our own abusive depravity, I have developed a theory of civilizational development which posits that when humans are free to treat one another as equally free there are always bursts of creative energy. This theory is what gave rise to the worldview chart that I shared in a previous post. This interesting idea leads to Thomas Jefferson’s restatement of John Locke’s rather gutsy thesis (Locke wrote under a pseudonym),
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
As Frederick Douglass and many others pointed out prior to the Civil War, the lofty notions of America’s creedal statement was rendered ridiculous by the presence of four million slaves owned as chattel property. This situation would not extend forever. By the summer of 1865, over three million Americans had engaged in one of history’s bloodiest conflicts leaving 620,000 of them in graves. The greatest legacy of that conflict was the freedom of those four million black slaves making the Civil War a remarkable story of redemption.
I conclude that something unique was taking place in every state and territory of the United States of America in 1861. I further conclude that what motivated the millions of volunteers and conscripts in the Civil War was deeply spiritual in nature, even if this was not always recognized by those who signed up to fight.
Other nations have adopted creedal statements like the Declaration of Independence, but no other nation has been willing to pay the price of aligning its society with these principles. The Civil War was that price. Mr. Jefferson and the Founding Fathers were aware of the glaring irony between their declaration and its practice. While wanting to end slavery, Mr. Jefferson saw that the desire for such an end and its implementation would be difficult to reconcile. He compared the issue of slavery to holding a “… wolf by the ears and can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in the one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
When there was a failed vote to end slavery, Jefferson voiced his concern in almost poetic terms, “The voice of a single individual would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus, we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment! Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, was sent to the United States to assess its penal system. During his travels, he saw the enervating effects of slavery on the Southern economy and correctly predicted that the livelier and more individualistic attitude of the North would economically overwhelm the South.
And perhaps it has ever been thus. In his book, “Enemies of Society”, historian Paul Johnson argues that slavery so deadened the economies of both Greece and Rome that it destroyed the middle class from which comes civilizational energy. The abundance of slave labour blunted the need for technological improvement. Indeed, the Roman Emperor Vespasian refused to utilize an engineering innovation which would have greatly reduced the human energy required to move large marble blocks because it would displace the labour of the slaves leading to civil unrest. No room to expand the economic pie in Vespasian’s zero-sum world.
So why did the Americans fight their war? Why was the country, both North and South, willing to offer so great a sacrifice? So that young men could seek adventure and belong to a Band of Brothers? Did they fight to preserve the Union and vouchsafe a trust from previous generations? Was it to protect slavery as a social and economic way of life? Is it possible to conceive of today’s citizens of the United States tolerating the daily arrival of over 6,000 coffins filled with dead young men? That these men and boys (and girls) fought, and fought hard, is beyond question.
But… why?
Some years ago, during one of Canada’s spasms of separatist anxiety, I polled my friends to see who was willing to sign up and fight for the preservation of the Confederation. There were no takers. At the same time, I asked a simple question of fact about one of the foundational events in the creation of Canada and only 20 percent of my respondents could offer even a partial answer. Was the American Civil War generation an anomaly? Or are Americans so different that they would again rush to arms in the event of a modern secessionist movement?
But… why did they fight?
The most complete and direct attempt to answer this question is an interesting study by historian James McPherson described in his book, “For Cause and Comrades; Why Men Fought in the Civil War”. McPherson cogently argues that, in the final two years of the war, the Northern soldier was fighting to end slavery just as the Southern soldier was fighting to maintain it. And, in an irony noted by President Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, both sides were motivated by a faith that convinced them that God was on their side. As one Northern soldier wrote to his family, “…the hand of God is in this, and that in spite of victories and advantages He will deny us Peace until we grant to others the liberties we ask for ourselves...”
Based on previous experience, this is the point when I will be charged with being an unthinking American apologist. To blunt this charge, then, I make a distinction between my strong assent to Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration and the basic decency of the average American on the one hand and the American government on the other. Those who take a legally actionable oath of allegiance to the Constitution are often, it seems to me, the quickest to trash it for ideological reasons. Lately it has become fashionable to call these government folks the “uniparty elitists” and that works for me. When I speak glowingly of the “American experiment” it is the American people and the documents they revere rather than these elitists, Republican or Democrat, that I have in mind.
Born of Lockean nostrums that were unmatched in practice, the American experiment in freedom is perhaps the most consequential application of Judeo-Christian principles ever conceived and carried out. If I am correct that freedom is the foundation of creativity, then any country willing that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash should be paid by another drawn with the sword” will be a remarkably creative nation. Think of that the next time you travel in the developing world and see a tin Coca Cola sign being used as someone’s roof. It is a most remarkable thing.
With this context in mind, is the United States of America about to come completely apart at the seams? Some argue that great civilizations are doomed to rise and fall within a 250-year span of time. So, is the US doomed to decay and drift into economic and military irrelevance? I see nothing to suggest that the wisdom of the American founding documents are stale dated. But the continued vigour of these documents comes with a caveat. For the documents to remain active and prophylactic there must be a continued and energetic defense of personal and corporate freedom universally applied. Herr Schwab and the Great Reset notwithstanding, I see ample energy among the US people of all political leanings to support continued freedom and creativity and so I am optimistic. The same cannot be said for the minority of uniparty elitists but the sun currently shining on their special day is beginning to set and it can’t come soon enough. The stability of my retirement stands a much better chance of success if my American neighbours have their moxy.