By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
‘The currents of history ebb and flow,” President Obama
submitted this morning in Tallinn, Estonia. “But over time, they flow toward
freedom.” This, it seems, is a favored formulation of our 44th president.
Pontificating on the current state of the world, Obama is fond of chastising
those actors who meet with his disapprobation by passively informing them that
they are, in a cosmic sense, “wrong,” and that their behavior is incommensurate
with the spirit of the era. The Islamic State, Obama has proposed “has no place
in the 21st century.” Russia, meanwhile, is operating in both Crimea and
Ukraine “on the wrong side of history.” At home and abroad, this is a theme to
which the president returns incessantly. “The arc of the moral universe is
long,” he likes to intone, “but it bends toward justice.”
This, I’m afraid, is so much wishful thinking — the
product of a tragic, if popular, conflation of ideas. There is little wrong
with an American president judging harshly the actions of foreign powers. All
cultures are not equal, and the superiority of the West — and, within it, the Anglosphere
— should be proclaimed as loudly and proudly as is tactful. But to acknowledge
that an idea is virtuous is by no means to imply that it is regnant or that it
is inevitable. Au contraire. Liberty as we understand it in the United States
has been the exception not the rule — and its survival over the past three
centuries the consequence not of happy foreordination but of the good guys in
the world having enjoyed unmatched military and financial supremacy. Having
known little else, the historically myopic will find it tempting to presume
that our present global order represents the immutable state of nature. It does
not. Just as the primary reason that the forces of liberty have prevailed since
1815 is that they have enjoyed unmatched power, the relative peace and buzzing
international trade that we currently enjoy is the product not of the West’s
moral dominance, but of the prepotency first of the British Empire and then —
after a seamless and invisible handover — of an ascendant United States. “Freedom
will win,” the president said this morning in an egregious and curiously
self-refuting phrase, “not because it’s inevitable, not because it is ordained,
but because these basic human yearnings for dignity and justice and democracy
do not go away.” What silliness. If freedom “wins,” it will be, as it has
always been, because the free maintained the upper hand over the barbarians.
Arcs and flows have bugger all to do with it.
Perversely, the false conviction that circumstances are
destined always to improve typically leads to two diametrically opposed
extremes. On the one hand, such expectations justify a certain passivity and
lack of interest in events, for if we believe that, “over time,” the “currents
of history . . . flow toward freedom,” then we must also believe that we might
sit back in comfort and watch the tides take their course. Alternatively, the
assumption can justify excessive and zealous coercion, for, if mankind is
destined by historical currents to wind up at an arranged destination, it presumably
can’t hurt if the state attempts to help it along. Anybody who doubts the
wicked forces that can be unleashed by a widespread belief in predestination
might take a moment to examine the determinists who ruined the 20th century.
There is, I’m afraid, an abominable logic to fatalistic totalitarianism:
Because the future has been prophesied, then all state action taken to
accelerate the change must, by its nature, be good; all individuals who
dissent, meanwhile, are by definition refusing to accept reality and are thus
acting as “wreckers” and “saboteurs.” By this rationale did the Soviet Union
justify its purges. Thus did Prussianism twice explain its mission. On this
pretext did China take its ghastly leaps “forward.” A more limited form of this
mistake, alas, made its way into America’s policy toward Iraq.
In the West, the optimists’ most common mistake is the
conflation of Whiggism the philosophy and Whiggism the historical guide.
Broadly speaking, a “Whig” — or, in America, a “republican” (note the small R)
— is a man who sides with parliament in the centuries-old fight between the
legislature and the king; who supports to a considerable degree the legal and
civil toleration of eccentrics, non-conformists, religious minorities, and
political dissenters; who privileges individual liberty and the rights of
conscience over the whims of the mob; who favors social fluidity and
opportunity and resists the rule of the landed gentry — the “country and not
the court,” in the antiquated parlance; and who trusts markets and businesses
more than experts and mandarins. In the United States, Whiggism has often had
about it a more staunchly individualistic bent than elsewhere in the
Anglosphere, having been imbued during the Revolution with an ardent spirit
that has never quite simmered down, and having taken its intellectual cues more
frequently from the radical John Locke than from the moderate Algernon Sidney.
In addition to their historically pro-Roundhead sentiments, American Whigs have
tended to elevate as their guiding principle the words of the Declaration of
Independence and of the Constitution of the United States; to have considered
democracy as little more than a useful but limited tool within a system that
privileges the integrity of unalienable rights above all else; to contend that
government, per the historian J. G. A. Pocock, represents the “principal source
of corruption” in everyday life; and to have demanded that the laws be applied
blindly to all and sundry, regardless of their station.
By contrast, the Whig interpretation of history, as
described by Herbert Butterfield and his ilk, holds not only that classically
liberal principles are virtuous and necessary but that their export and
prevalence is inexorable: In other words, that History is the story of
continual improvement, and that advances in human freedom are therefore
inevitable. This, I would submit, is veritable nonsense — at its root, little
more than a slightly less irritable Marxism. If human beings were, over time,
becoming increasingly morally advanced and if their institutions were inching
gradually toward perfection, we would expect to see a set of rather different
books in our libraries — books, perhaps, that had the Western Roman Empire
forestalling the Dark Ages and the liberal promise of the 20th century being
fulfilled. In 1909, the British parliamentarian Norman Angell was so convinced
that the growth of international trade had rendered both militarism and empire
obsolete that he accused his skeptical countrymen of having succumbed to an
“optical illusion.” Five years later, Europe and the wider world were ravaged
by the bloodiest war in history. At its conclusion, Angell’s optimism gave way
to another period of saccharine overconfidence — and one that was only smashed
in earnest when tanks began to roll over sacred borders and human beings were
herded into ovens. Later, while the siren’s call of “never again” still hung in
the air, an evil empire descended across much of the world. In turn, its
decline would be met with the pronouncement that History, once again, had come
to an end. Talk is cheap.
’Twas ever thus. There have been approximately 200,000
years of what we generally regard as “human history,” and in less than 1
percent of those years has it been broadly agreed that it is not entirely
copacetic to remove a man’s head because he refuses to pray to your favorite
god. In Mesopotamia, a movement has arisen to question that principle in both
theory and in practice. In Eastern Europe, Vladimir Putin is auditioning
enthusiastically for the role of Catherine the Great. In Israel, the ceasefire
remains on a knife’s edge. At which point, one wonders, will it at last be safe
to conclude that humanity’s inchoate “yearnings” have triumphed?
Never.
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