{"id":6455,"date":"2018-07-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2018\/07\/01\/american-exceptionalism-examined\/"},"modified":"2018-07-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-01T00:00:00","slug":"american-exceptionalism-examined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2018\/07\/01\/american-exceptionalism-examined\/","title":{"rendered":"American Exceptionalism Examined"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), the celebrated French author of Democracy in America,<\/em> awakened in present-day America, he would likely be deeply shocked by the polarization, radicalism, and most of all the hostility between liberalism and religion. For what he found so exceptional during his visit to America in the 1830s was that, contrary to the virulent theologico-political conflicts in France, \u201cthe spirit of religion and spirit of freedom\u201d were \u201cintimately linked together in joint reign over the same land,\u201d while church and state were institutionally separate.<\/p>\n

America had not only resolved the besetting problem of the relationship between church and state, but also, as he wrote in the preface to the twelfth edition (1848), that of popular sovereignty. \u201cIt is put in practice in the most direct, unlimited, and absolute way. For sixty years that people who have made it the common fount of all their laws . . . has been not only the most prosperous but also the most stable of the peoples in the world.\u201d France must learn from America, he argued. \u201cLet us look there for instruction . . . let us adopt the principles.\u201d <\/p>\n

And in Democracy in America<\/em> Tocqueville furnished the instructions and principles. Although written to \u201cinstruct\u201d France, itbecame a universal manual for democracy, particularly after totalitarianism in the 1930s. Today, with \u201cthe erosion of liberal democracy now suddenly reaching crisis proportions,\u201d it has new relevance. <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the novelty that struck Tocqueville most: \u201cequality of conditions,\u201d the fundamental fact from which, he said, all other facts about American politics and culture seem to be derived, and was the central point at which all his observations constantly terminated. A term he used interchangeably with democracy, \u201cequality of conditions\u201d didn\u2019t mean, for Tocqueville, material equality of all Americans, but rather the lack of social ranks, of hierarchical distinctions between aristocrats and peasants, upon which European society was based for centuries.<\/p>\n

To grasp Tocqueville\u2019s wonder at American equality, we must appreciate the grip that the idea of hierarchy, or the great chain of being, had on Western society. Originating in Greek philosophy and adopted by the dominant church hierarchy, it shaped the \u201ctheology and cosmology of medieval Christendom.\u201d But \u201cit was in the eighteenth century that the conception of the universe as a chain of being, and the principles which underlay this conception . . . attained their widest diffusion and acceptance.\u201d <\/p>\n

Indeed, eighteenth-century France epitomized the practical application of these principles. The Ancien R<\/em>\u00e9gime<\/em> legitimated the clerical and social hierarchy as an integral part of a divine universe. So, equality, leveling hierarchy, was not only going against God but destroying the universe itself. In Shakespeare\u2019s words: \u201cTake but degree [hierarchy] away, untune that string, and, hark, what discord follows!\u201d This fear of chaos, validated in the eyes of monarchists and the church by the disorders of the French Revolution and nineteenth-century revolutions, animated arguments against democracy. <\/p>\n

Tocqueville responded by presenting American democracy as a model. Most significant, in my view, was his argument that democracy itself is a Christian idea, the flowering of the gospel message that \u201call men are equal before God.\u201d For it refuted the bogus theological justification of hierarchy and the church\u2019s reactionary support of the Ancien R<\/em>\u00e9gime<\/em>. Indeed, reflecting on how since the twelfth century most major events had conspired to advance equality, \u201ccentury by century over every obstacle and even now going forward,\u201d Tocqueville concluded, that \u201cin itself gives this progress the sacred character of the will of the Sovereign Master. [Accordingly] to halt democracy appears as a fight against God himself, and nations have no alternative but to acquiesce to the social state imposed by Providence.\u201d <\/p>\n

But France and the church had not. They \u201cpresent an alarming spectacle,\u201d wrote Tocqueville, a curious blindness to the irresistible democratic currents shaping their society. \u201cHence democracy has been left to its wild instincts.\u201d The result is that \u201cwe have our democracy without those elements which might have mitigated its vices and brought out its natural good points.\u201d To be sure, the specter of \u201cdemocratic despotism\u201d first appeared with the French Revolution and shadowed France all the way to the twentieth century. Only after the Second World War, and with American aid, did France become a thriving liberal democracy. <\/p>\n

In other words, France didn\u2019t heed Tocqueville\u2019s \u201clessons\u201d or warnings. Driven by passion for equality, to complete the republican ideals of the revolution, French thinkers never gave primacy to freedom, even as postwar prosperity liberalized French society. Beholden to Marxism and absorbing Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, they concocted illiberal philosophical cults that cast \u201csuspicion\u201d on liberal democracy. Only in the 1980s, with the decline of Communism and the recovery of Tocqueville and other French liberal thinkers, did France develop liberal political thought. <\/p>\n

That democratic passions stymied liberty in France for more than 150 years after the revolution should alert us to the great danger the populist passions now besieging Western democracies pose to freedom. This danger, which Tocqueville saw in France of his day, convinced him that the survival of liberty \u201clies only in the harmony of the liberal sentiment and religious sentiment, both working simultaneously to animate and to restrain souls [passions].\u201d <\/p>\n

Again, to appreciate Tocqueville\u2019s conviction, we must set it against the medieval hierarchical universe, which was, as the eminent medievalist R. W. Southern neatly put it, \u201can attempt to describe the whole cosmos and men\u2019s place in it, and to regulate the details of human life in the light of this description.\u201d By destroying this cosmos, which regulated \u201cthe details of human life,\u201d modernity\/democracy urgently raised the question of how \u201chuman life\u201d or society was now<\/em> to be regulated. <\/p>\n

If Tocqueville\u2019s answer was that both liberalism and religion were necessary, the Radical Enlightenment\u2019s answer was that only philosophy or reason was necessary. Not only so, it sought to destroy Christianity, which it blamed for all the pathologies of the Ancien R<\/em>\u00e9gime<\/em>. Reactionaries sought on the other hand, to restore the Ancien<\/em> hierarchy. This \u201cstrange confusion\u201d in which \u201cmen of religion fight against freedom, and lovers of liberty attack religions, noble and generous spirits praise slavery, while low, servile minds preach independence\u201d vexed Tocqueville. But he wasn\u2019t pessimistic. <\/p>\n

Invoking Providence, he wrote: \u201cAm I to believe that the Creator made man in order to let him struggle endlessly through intellectual squalor now surrounding us? I cannot believe that; God intends a calmer and more stable future for the peoples of Europe.\u201d In America He had providentially provided a remedy. \u201cI saw in America more than America, it was the shape of democracy itself.\u201d And he traced its \u201cshape\u201d to America\u2019s dual founding: Puritan Protestantism and the Moderate Enlightenment. <\/p>\n

He particularly noted Puritanism\u2019s democratic and republican character, its self-disciplining individualism and indirect restraining influence on politics and society. He also noted that Christianity had \u201cpreserved a great empire over the spirit of the Americans,\u201d because the American Enlightenment was moderate, and not radical like the French. The distinction between the Moderate and the Radical Enlightenment is of first importance. For the Enlightenment has been homogenized, as Henry F. May rightly noted, yet the Anglo-American and French Enlightenments \u201cdiffered sharply on important matters.\u201d The former, which rested on Newton and Locke and was grounded on God, \u201cpreached order and religious compromise.\u201dThe latter, grounded on reason, was atheistic and virulently anti-Christian. Its ambition was \u201cconstructing [without God] a new heaven and earth out of the destruction of the old.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crux is that the radical anti-Christianity of the French Enlightenment was intimately coupled to the political intransigence of the Catholic Church, its reactionary support of the Ancien R<\/em>\u00e9gime<\/em>, a point that Tocqueville noted. \u201cUnbelievers in Europe attack Christians more as political than as religious enemies,\u201d and he decried that \u201cEuropean Christianity has allowed itself to be intimately united with the powers of this world\u201d Again, writing to the racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, he insisted that Christianity must be distinguished \u201cfrom the historical accretions and distortions it had suffered.\u201d For facile identification of Christianity with European powers obfuscates its \u201cinner freedom.\u201d For him, all the abuses blamed on Christianity were because of \u201csecondary circumstances\u201d involving the transmission through inevitably flawed \u201chistoric vehicles.\u201d <\/p>\n

Tellingly, the Apocalypse foresaw \u201cthe historical accretions and distortions.\u201d For it revealingly ends with a stern warning against those who add or subtract from the revealed Word (Revelation 22:18, 19). And it\u2019s because of the additions and subtractions or the \u201chistorical accretions and distortions\u201d that Protestants identified the Papacy as the antichrist. Theology of the antichrist aside, the \u201caddition\u201d of \u201cConstantine\u2019s sword\u201d was historically consequential. The political development of Europe is only understandable, as Pierre Manent stressed, as a history of answers (or struggles to answer) the theologico-political problem posed by the church. <\/p>\n

Thus, in my view, the crux of American exceptionalism is in solving the centuries-old theologico-political problem—a solution in which the Apocalypse played a key role. \u201cMost of English America was peopled by men,\u201d as Tocqueville observed, \u201cwho, having shaken off the pope\u2019s authority, acknowledged no other religious supremacy.\u201d Precisely, \u201cone of the prime targets of Protestant polemicists was the doctrine of papal absolutism . . . [and] papal pretensions to coercive power and jurisdiction in secular affairs.\u201d Thus, separation of church and state, religious liberty and liberal and republican conceptions of freedom, as Clement Fatovic showed, were elucidated in contradiction to Catholic practices and principles, seen as the embodiment of tyranny itself.<\/p>\n

The Great Awakening popularized these ideas, in its preaching of equality of all, asceticism, sanctity of individual conscience, personal responsibility and suspicion of religious absolutism. According to Ruth Bloch, American revolutionary ideology also drew from these Protestant ideas, but the tendency is to overlook the Protestant influence. And that\u2019s not surprising. From the very inception of modernity, thinkers hid their debt to Christianity. Descartes is a case in point, a tendency Locke noticed. \u201cMany are beholden to revelation,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwho do not acknowledge it.\u201d <\/p>\n

And unwillingness to acknowledge reliance on Revelation, or the Judeo-Christian substance of Western civilization is a superficial sign of a deeper negation: rebellion against God, the \u201cmetaphysical revolt\u201d (in Albert Camus\u2019 words), or \u201cegophanic revolt\u201d (as Eric Voegelin put it). It began with self-deification, the Cartesian ego, and culminated in Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cmurder of God.\u201d And the vacuum created by the \u201cmurder of God\u201d was filled by secular religions—nationalism, scientism, Darwinism, Marxism—heralding the man-gods: the Stalins and Hitlers. While the \u201cvacuum of values\u201d created by the destruction of the Judeo-Christian substance engendered the anomie and identity crisis that bedevils liberalism.<\/p>\n

America wasn\u2019t part of this \u201cmetaphysical revolt\u201d until the 1960s, when, either indifferent to or ignorant of America\u2019s dual founding, radical liberalism shattered the \u201cjoint reign\u201d between liberalism and religion. Under the spell of French postmodernism, inspired by Foucault, Derrida, and others, who drew from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud, radical liberalism denied transcendence to authorize a radical individualism free from all morals and absolutes. Attacking religion, it sought to \u201creign\u201d alone, or cultural totalitarianism. But, as we are seeing, winning the \u201cculture wars\u201d is not enough—humanity itself must be deconstructed<\/em>. Biological markers of gender must be obliterated and identities diffused into Dionysian formlessness. <\/p>\n

The Dionysian element, most salient in Nietzsche, harks back to archaic Greece and must be brought to the fore to grasp the real meaning of postmodernism. It\u2019s \u201cDionysus against the Crucified,\u201d<\/em> as Nietzsche himself put it.<\/em>\u201d Or the devil against Christ,<\/em> in biblical apocalyptic terms. And it\u2019s in biblical apocalyptic terms that Evangelicals and American Christians must view the \u201cpost-Christian barbarism.\u201d The crux is to grasp with Paul, that \u201cour struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against . . . the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms\u201d (Ephesians 6:12, NIV).29<\/sup> <\/p>\n

Therefore, to wage \u201cour struggle\u201d through political means or cultural strategies, in pursuit of a Christian hegemony, is to evince a profound spiritual blindness. Indeed, the schema of the Antichrist is applying political remedies to spiritual maladies. \u201c \u2018Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,\u2019 says the Lord Almighty\u201d (Zechariah 4:6, NIV). The gospel, as Dostoevsky acutely noted, is \u201ca double-edged weapon, which may lead a person not to humility and ultimate self-control but, on the contrary, to the most satanic pride—that is, to fetters and not to freedom.\u201d30<\/sup><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Tocqueville contended that the gospel must not be \u201cmingled with the bitter passions of this world.\u201d31<\/sup> For mingled, it becomes a monstrosity, symbolically represented in the Apocalypse by Babylon (confusion) and hybrid mythical beasts (worldly empires). At birth America was an exception to this monstrosity. But if it mixes church and state and hollows out civil and religious liberties, it will become the lamblike beast, which speaks like a dragon (Revelation 13:11).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), the celebrated French author of Democracy in America, awakened in present-day America, he would likely be deeply shocked by the polarization, radicalism, and most of all the hostility between liberalism and religion. For what he found so exceptional during his visit to America in the 1830s was that, contrary to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[324],"tags":[156],"class_list":["post-6455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-july-august-2018","tag-july-august-2018"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}