An America without humility

John Lewis Gaddis, writing in the American Interest Magazine, argues that the only means through which Americans can reclaim their former moral stature is if we embrace fighting and ending tyranny as the central guiding philosophy of our approach to the world:

That is why I think a return to our roots is called for. Promoting democracy without its prerequisites can only breed disappointment abroad and disillusionment at home. It suggests that we think we know better than other people do what is best for them—and it too often confirms that we do not. It leaches legitimacy from our priorities.

But only tyrants are apt to defend tyranny. A focus on ending it could move us beyond distracting debates over where democracy can be transplanted and how long this might take, allowing concentration instead upon the single greatest prerequisite for democracy, which, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once reminded us, is freedom from fear. It is from this that all the other freedoms flow. [...]

This, then, should be our standard: to respect the ways in which people elsewhere define their fears, not to impose our own fears upon them. That may mean working with authoritarian regimes when there is more to fear than their authoritarianism—when the trajectory is toward making democracy possible, even if it’s still a long way off. But it also requires resisting regimes—and terrorist movements—whose course lies in the opposite direction: toward making themselves the source of all fears, rather than the safeguard against them. Tyranny is being enslaved to fear, and it will be quite enough, for the next few decades at least, to secure emancipation.

Yale historian Jon Butler calls the “evangelical paradigm” the “single most powerful explanatory device adopted by academic historians to account for the distinctive features of American society, culture, and identity.”  And if for a moment you disregard the contemporary connotation associated with “evangelical” then this makes perfect sense.  The United States was colonized and settled by people like Puritan leader John Winthrop, who – in his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” – declared that this new continent “was a city on a hill”:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God… We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us til we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a-going.

The colony on the Massachusetts Bay was supposed to be the beginning of a New Israel which eventually – with the Lord’s blessing – would spread the true gospel to all corners of the Earth.  Of course, religious beliefs grow and change, and the strict Puritanism which characterized New England would morph into something much, much milder.  But by that point, the missionary zeal which characterized early Puritanism had seeped into the American consciousness, and was already influencing our approach to the world around us (our westward expansion was almost certainly driven by a belief that the land in this continent was ours by God’s own decree).  This missionary zeal for liberty (which was drawn from a belief in God) has been a part of our discourse for the whole of our history; we can see it in the abolitionist movements of the early 19th century, the push for “Manifest Destiny” and the Civil War.  Gaddis, to his credit, correctly identifies the American thirst for evangelism, and places George W. Bush’s rhetoric within that tradition.  But where he errs is in thinking that said zeal is a good thing. 

In his 1944 book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Reinhold Niebuhr criticizes liberal theorists (of all stripes) for having an unjustifiably sanguine view of human nature.  His argument, boiled down to it’s basics, is that liberals don’t take evil seriously enough, and aren’t aware of their limitations in ameliorating the human condition.  Moreover, because liberals lack a serious understanding of evil, they are left unprepared when their ideas lead to the same injustices and degradations that they sought to prevent in the first place.  Now, Niebuhr was writing in the midst of the Second World War, and had lived through the First, so it’s clear that his ideas were strongly influenced by those terrible conflicts.  Regardless, I think there are valuable lessons to be drawn from the book, namely, that a little humility is required whenever we look to “solve” a problem.  To steal a little bit from David Brook’s interview with Obama:

“I take away [from Niebuhr],” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things.

Gaddis could use a heavy dose of Niebuhrian humility.  He doesn’t seem to recognize that an evangelical foreign policy, focused on “ending tyranny,” has the potential to be disastrous for countless people.  In fact, Bush’s crusade for “freedom” in Iraq has already given us a taste of what such a foreign policy might look like; the Iraqis were “liberated,” yes, but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, and millions of displaced Iraqis.  If anything, now should be the time that we’re repudiating this country’s legacy of international evangelism; the last thing we should be doing is looking to “end tyranny” or “promote democracy.” 

That isn’t to say though that we should just retreat to our little corner, and simply let things play out.  By virtue of being the world’s foremost military and economic power – as well as one of the architects of the international system – we have a very real role to play.  Although our heritage of “evangelism” has a place in how we orient ourselves to the world (I will be the first to say that American ideas are often a good thing), nevertheless it shouldn’t take center stage, at least not in it’s current form.  It simply provides too many opportunities for well-intentioned, but reckless and ultimately dangerous foreign policy adventurism.