‘History teaches us only that no-one ever learnt anything from history.’ Possibly, George: I think that conclusion’s too optimistic. Klio has taught me that the default settings of human society are xenophobia, tyranny and superstition, and that only rarely have human communities made partial escapes from any of them. Such communities are in rebellion against nature, and cannot win. But they shed a fine light down the ages.
A total escape from the default settings is probably neither possible nor desirable. One can argue the issue more than one way: is the opposite of xenophobia tolerance or self-hatred? If one says that the opposite of xenophobia is tolerance, that leaves no room on the hate-spectrum for self-hatred, a feeling, or disposition, that we know exists. Of course one might suggest that xenophobia and self-hatred are closely related, two sides of the same coin: is it possible to hate others without hating ourselves, at some level? This is certainly a plausible position in spiritual terms.
These considerations will be limited by an Aristotelian framework: I want to suggest that the opposite of one vice is another vice and that virtue lies midway. If Aristotle drives you up the wall feel free to stop reading.
Assuming, then, that the opposite of xenophobia is self-hatred, the midpoint is a cosmopolitan patriotism: the state of mind in which one hates neither oneself or others, but manages to respect and value others while feeling a particular loyalty to one’s home.
Similarly, the opposite of tyranny is anarchy, the virtuous middle being accountable government. The opposite of superstition – believing things regardless of evidence or logic- is cynicism, a refusal to believe in anything.
Consider the ancient Athenians. For a brief space, a century and a half, they achieved all three, opening their borders to the metics, creating a democracy, and fostering the growth of rationalist philosophy. They remained patriotic – indeed they failed to free themselves sufficiently from xenophobia, as one can see from reading Thucydides. Nor did they achieve a properly accountable government – the absence of stabilising intermediate corporations left Athenian policy dangerously unpredictable and subject to the tyranny of the majority. Most of all, they did not manage to free themselves sufficiently from superstition, regardless of all the headlines about Socrates and Plato. The Sicilian Expedition came to grief partly because of a commander’s superstitious dread of a lunar eclipse. The dread of ritual pollution was a force powerful enough to drive the plays of Sophocles. Socrates himself insisted on making a sacrifice to the god Aesculapius in his last hour. The Athenian escape from superstition was very limited in time, degree and numbers.
Yet even this partial achievement of escape from the default settings can move us today: it shines in the ancient world as an example of what might be.
Later, the English achieved the same thing. But if we’ve done better than the Athenians we’ve had some mighty helpers. The universalism of Christian ethics is a powerful corrective to xenophobia: the Athenians could only appeal to reason – a much weaker regulative ideal. Germanic customary law provided (and provides) a much better institutional foundation for accountable government than Kleisthenes could. And the Athenians themselves provided the intellectual toolkit which rendered the English less susceptible than most to superstition – and if that seems like a questionable assertion, Robert Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre might be a useful corrective.
But the rebellion had to cross the sea to find its fulfilment in a community that encompassed a mixture of peoples greater than any that Britain could contain. The Native Americans paid the price – a hideous price - for an extraordinary novus ordo seclorum. Bill Whittle, in this essay, described Americans as the Rebels. His frame of reference was Star Wars, but he was actually right: America is a rebellion – a permanent revolution, if you will – against the way things are. It should scarcely need demonstrating that its patriotism is cosmopolitan: there is not a nation in the world which has not sent people to wrap themselves in Old Glory.
Its government is probably as accountable as the government of any extensive territory could be. Incidentally, talk of Americans believing that only their form of democracy is legitimate is wide of the mark: Americans have no difficulty recognising other nations as democratic even if they are monarchies as opposed to republics, even if they use proportional representation instead of first-past-the-post, even if they have an unwritten constitution as opposed to a written one. There is plenty of scope for diversity within the American political model: the essence of that model is accountability. The rest is detail.
As for rationality, America’s escape from superstition has gone as far as most humans can cope with: there is a certain quantum of irrationalism that will always be expressed in any community. Gun fetishism, evangelism and a belief in the objectivity of mainstream media are not the most harmful forms of irrationalism that a country can have.
It can’t last, of course. The default settings will reassert themselves. This is why Bill Whittle’s desire for endless triumph is basically noble but tragic: it won’t happen, though I sympathise greatly with the wish. (After America is gone most of those people who resent American power will wish for it back.) America’s power will wane, all earthly powers do, and new powers will arise who will make the same old-new appeal to the monsters from the id. America’s arche might last another century, or two at most. And the memory – of a glittering, free, brilliant cosmopolis - will endure through the ages. Just like Athens.