Ominous Parallels (13 page)

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers.

The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

Twice in our century Germany fought to rule and impose its culture on the rest of the world. It lost both wars. But on a deeper level it is achieving its goal nevertheless. It is on the verge of winning the
philosophical
war against the West, with everything this implies.

The ideas of German philosophy have long since jumped national borders and become the trend of the West. Half the countries of Europe are already enslaved by such ideas. The rest of the continent, under similar guidance, is on the point of collapse.

There is only one country which, though paralyzed at present, is still able to resist the German takeover. In all history, it is the least likely candidate for such a takeover, if it can regain its own ideas and its self-esteem in time.

The last battle of the war of the century is now taking place—in the last of the great, unconquered nations left on earth.

5

The Nation of the Enlightenment

Since the golden age of Greece, there has been only one era of reason in twenty-three centuries of Western philosophy. During the final decades of that era, the United States of America was created as an independent nation. This is the key to the country—to its nature, its development, and its uniqueness: the United States is
the nation of the Enlightenment.

Thomas Aquinas’s reintroduction of Aristotelianism was the beginning—the beginning of the end of the medieval period, the beginning of the beginning of the era of reason.

The Renaissance carried Aquinas’s achievement further. The fading of the power of religion; the revolt against the authority of the church; the breakup of the feudal caste system; the widespread assimilation of the thought of pagan antiquity; the brilliant outpouring of inventions, of explorations, of man-glorifying art; the first momentous steps of modern science—all of it meant that men had finally rediscovered the reality and the promise of this earth, of man, of man’s
mind.

The seventeenth century carried the advance still further, by means of two major achievements: in science, the discoveries that culminated in the Newtonian triumph; in philosophy, the creation (by Descartes, Locke, and others) of the first modern systems, the first attempts to provide Western man with a comprehensive world view incorporating the discoveries of the new science. Whatever their contradictions, these systems are united in proclaiming one crucial programmatic manifesto: let us sweep aside the errors of the past and make a fresh start; the universe is intelligible; there is nothing outside man’s power to know, if he uses the proper method of knowledge; the method is reason.

The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the
Age of Enlightenment.
For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture ; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present. The desperate battle, it seemed at the time, had finally been won: science had won; ignorance, superstition, faith—i.e., religion—had lost. The promise of the earlier centuries, it seemed, had now been fulfilled. The philosophers and scientists had delivered on that promise, and men were intoxicated not merely by a program and a potential, but by the proven power and actual achievements of man’s mind.

Once again, as in the high point of classical civilization, the thinkers of the West regarded the acceptance of reason as
uncontroversial.
They regarded the exercise of man’s intellect not as a sin to be proscribed, or as a handmaiden to be tolerated, or even as a breathtaking discovery to be treated gingerly, but as
virtue,
as the norm, the to-be-expected.

It was only a brief span of decades. It did not last.

Because the systems of seventeenth-century philosophy were profoundly flawed in every fundamental branch and issue, the very thinkers who took the lead in championing reason were also (unwittingly) preparing the way for its eventual banishment from the philosophic scene. They were committing all the disastrous errors of omission and commission that would shortly open the door to Hume, and then to Kant, and then to the post-Kantian revolt against the faculty of thought. In the graph of modern man’s ascent from stagnant mindlessness, the Enlightenment is the high point and the final entry. Major existential and cultural expressions of the Enlightenment mind continued to develop into the nineteenth century and even thereafter—in science, in the rise of romantic art, in the Industrial Revolution; but as a pervasive philosophic force, the West’s commitment to reason ended with the eighteenth century.

Betrayed and abandoned at its height, the Enlightenment was a fleeting, precarious reprieve for the West, a brief respite from the reign of mysticism, a fragile oasis of man’s liberated intellect bounded on one side by the desert of the Dark and Middle Ages (and the mixed, transitional centuries leading out of them), and on the other by the jungle of post-Kantian irrationalism.

The oasis has long since disappeared, but there is still one nation to stand as its monument: the United States of America.

Almost without exception the countries of the world owe their origins to nonideological factors: to the accidents of war, the meaningless warfare of clashing tribes, or of geography, language, custom, etc. The United States is the first nation in history to be created on the basis of
ideas.
Its Founding Fathers were not tribal chiefs or power-lusting conquerors or a revelation-encrusted priesthood; they were thinkers, thinkers of the Enlightenment—educated, articulate, thoroughly imbued with the ideas of the period. Jeered at by traditionalists on both sides of the Atlantic, these men proposed to create a nation whose institutions would be without precedent, and to do it on the basis of a theory, an abstract theory of the nature of man and of the universe. The United States, they decided, would be the first country in history to stand for something. It would be the first nation to have an avowed philosophic meaning.

Just as men have always been influenced by some form of philosophy, yet historians properly ascribe the birth of the science—its origin as an explicit discipline—to the ancient Greeks, so with nations: they have always been influenced by some form of philosophy, yet it was not until the United States that philosophy, as an explicit system of ideas, generated the birth of a country. The Greeks discovered philosophy. The Americans were the first to build a nation on that discovery.

Although the Enlightenment spread across Europe, introducing a liberalizing influence wherever its ideas were taken seriously (notably in England and France), there was no European country in which these ideas penetrated to the root. In Europe, the Enlightenment was in the nature of an intellectual fashion superimposed on antithetic and deeply entrenched sociopolitical structures. But the United States was a new country, a new country in a new world, and there was no such established structure to contend with. For the first and only time, the ideas of the Enlightenment became the root, the actual foundation of a nation’s political institutions.

This is the great, historic feat of the United States, the source of the uniquely American character, the cause of the country’s spectacular, unprecedented achievements.

But this is also the key to the tragedy of the United States. A nation based on a philosophy cannot permanently survive the collapse of that philosophy. When the European Enlightenment collapsed, there were no American thinkers of consequence to sustain or defend its principles.

Although it is the country created by philosophy, America has never produced a major philosopher. The Founding Fatbers were thinkers but not philosophic innovators. They took their basic ideas from European intellectuals, they assumed with the rest of their age that these ideas were now incontestable and even self-evident, and they turned their attention to the urgent task of implementing these ideas in the realm of practical affairs.

This has always been the American pattern: from its colonial beginnings to the present day, American philosophy has been nothing but a reflection of European philosophy. Judged in terms of essentials, American thought has been a wholly derivative phenomenon, a passive, faithful handmaiden to the trends and fashions of Europe.

When Europe’s ideas changed, therefore, the nation of the Enlightenment was helpless. It was left defenseless, without the philosophic resources necessary to withstand the protracted Kantian battering. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, American intellectuals, succumbing docilely to the European lead, turned increasingly against every one of America’s founding ideas and ideals. While the people, taking the American system for granted, were working to build a magnificent industrial structure, the intellectuals were working to undermine the system, to discredit its root premises, to sap its self-confidence, to erode its institutions, to remake the United States in the image of the successive waves of European irrationalism.

The result is America today: a nation with the remnants of its distinctive meaning and institutions buried under more than a century and a half of intellectual wreckage; a nation which has kept some imperishable part of its original soul, but surrendered its mind to the alien ideas of the
anti-
Enlightenment; a country intellectually prostrate, haunted by a pervasive, undefined sense of uneasiness, of ominous foreboding, of national self-betrayal; a country torn by a profound conflict, without guidance or coherent direction, unable to follow its Founding Fathers or to renounce them.

Philosophically, the new country-to-be did not have an auspicious beginning. For a century the dominant intellectual influence in the colonies of the new world was the worst of the ideas of the old world: the devout Calvinism best articulated by
the Puritans.

God as the vindictive sovereign of the universe; faith as the primary means of knowledge; life as a pilgrimage through an alien realm; man as a “nothing-creature” defiled by Original Sin; salvation as a miracle inexplicably granted or denied according to a rigid scheme of predestination; morality as a yoke from which man dare not pluck his neck; pleasure as a distraction, pride as the cardinal vice, human strength or efficacy as a miserable delusion; virtue as self-sacrifice, “a Surrender of our Spirits and our Bodies unto God” (and “a world of self-denial” in behalf of the neighbor)—these are the central themes of the religion that the most influential settlers from Europe brought with them to the Atlantic sea-board.
¹

The mentality of Augustinianism had been transplanted to a virgin continent. It was the period of America’s Middle Ages.

Since man is innately depraved, the Puritans argued, a dictatorship ruled by the elect is required to curb his vicious impulses and enforce the Lord’s commandments. Since wealth, like all values, is a gift from Heaven, men of property are not owners of their wealth, but stewards charged with a divine trust; such men are properly subject to whatever economic controls the elect deem it necessary to impose. God, in short, rules nature; his agents, therefore, rule men.

It has been said—mostly by illiterates and conservatives—that the belief in God is at the base of the American system, and that the United States is a product of Christian piety. In fact, the religious mentality was not the source of this country’s distinctive institutions, but the fundamental obstacle to their emergence. So long as men took the idea of God
seriously,
the idea of America, the America conceived by the Founding Fathers, was not possible.

The transition out of the Puritan era was mediated in part by the Puritans themselves, owing to their dual heritage. As a late-sixteenth-century development, the Puritan outlook everywhere bears the mark not only of the medieval mind, but also, though less prominently, of the early modern struggle to live again in this world.

Having finally rediscovered this earth, men (including the Puritans) were eager to exploit their discovery, and it did not take long for them to grasp that this required intellectual training, personal initiative, productive enterprise (as against superstition, passivity, poverty, and the like). The former were new values in the modern world, admired to some extent throughout Europe, wherever men were animated by the Renaissance spirit. In America, these values took root more profoundly than in Europe, as a matter primarily of practical necessity. In the Puritan settlements, the requirements of existence coincided with the spirit of the Renaissance: in a wilderness, it is the values of human thought and action—or barbarism or death.

To identify the admiration of productive enterprise as the “Puritan ethic” is a misnomer, if it implies that such admiration is a religiously inspired phenomenon. What the Puritans (and their equivalents during the period) contributed to the new value-orientation was not its essential content, but its entrapment in the leftover meshes of medievalism. The claim that the pursuit of worldly success is a duty decreed by a wrathful God ; the conversion of men’s eager desire to exploit nature, into a grimly fearful struggle for salvation; the insistence that work must be performed selflessly, to serve God and the neighbor—all of it is medievalism reaching out to embrace and to tame an antithetic spirit.

Puritanism in America is religion trying to make terms with life on earth. It is an unstable compromise, made of two opposite philosophic approaches. In due course each was to be developed further.

The first element to be developed was the Renaissance approach. In the early decades of the eighteenth century the European Enlightenment came to America.