320 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13:
978-0375414039
God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making
of the Modern World is Walter
Russell Mead’s attempt to explain “the biggest geopolitical story of modern
times: the birth, rise, triumph, defense and continuing growth of
Anglo-American power despite continuing and always renewed opposition and
conflict”. Ever since the Glorious Revolution in 1688, Britain and America have
been on the winning side, from the war of the Spanish Succession to the Cold War,
and Mead shows the ways in which the Anglo-American political and economic
development of capitalism has spread throughout the world, without excuse or
apology. He details the advantages the English-speaking world gained and the
benefits this dominance bestowed on Britain and her colonies (especially the
United States) in the form of economic and political freedom that did not arise
fully formed, but instead developed in evolutionary steps that secured
individual liberty as an essential trait to continued development and change
over time. Most Britons don’t like being tied to modern America (Churchill and
Thatcher excepted, of course), while most Americans can’t see what ancient
Britain has to do with them, yet for outsiders the link between the
English-speaking peoples was horribly clear from the start: only a few years
after the American revolution the French were sending back horrified reports that
New England really was new England in spirit.
In
contrasting the Anglo-American system of constitutional democracy with the
competing systems of government that challenged it, Mead finds many cultures
unable to take advantage of their resources because of a failure to trust
individuals with freedom from state control. Even today he finds that opponents
of Western-led globalization fear that this freedom threatens their communities
of faith and nationhood. Examining most governments today he finds they
recognize they cannot withdraw completely from the electronic/information
revolution which tempts their citizens with visions of Western material goods
and freedom; this doesn’t stop them from attempting to limit the access and
effects that the Western World threatens them with. Both Radical Islam and
Socialists see inherent danger in freeing people from economic and social
controls; many fear the disruption of the old ways and see moral dissolution
and weakness in the Western Way of life. These outsiders have plenty of their
own explanations for the Anglosphere’s success: some of them are unworthy – with
anti-Semitism a constant theme – but most focus on the idea that the winners
relied on perfidy and violence abroad and cruelty and inequality at home. In
the old East Germany, officials had a list of terms to describe Britons:
“paralytic sycophants”, “effete betrayers of humanity”, “carrion-eating servile
imitators”, “arch-cowards and collaborators”, while today, a Muslim journalist
observes, “We worship God by loathing America”.
For all of this celebrating
of the Anglosphere’s apparent superiority, Mead eschews jingoism: having
declared Britain and America to be triumphant in global power politics, he
doesn’t shy from exposing the dark underbelly that can also be discovered: no
Europeans, he points out, came on grand tours of England to buy objets d’art, and he quotes the British
MP writing to his constituents as to how “I am surprised by your insolence in
troubling me. You know what I very well know, that I bought you”. Mead also
pinpoints an irony of Anglo-American success: after each victory they have a lousy
record of predicting what will come next, nearly always declaring some version
of a New World Order, only for a new evil to emerge. Often they seem blissfully
unaware of the ire their success has caused. But there is lightheartedness
here, too: it is difficult to think of another front-line foreign-affairs writer
who would connect Occam’s razor to Hollywood and link the prophet Abraham to
McDonald’s, or, indeed, spot the agenda of an international conference in the
Walrus poem in Lewis Carroll’s Through
the Looking-Glass: the walrus’s list of conversational subjects begins with
trade in manufactured goods (shoes), goes on to services (sealing wax was used
on legal documents), before touching on farm products (cabbages), political
reform (kings), global warming (the boiling hot sea) and finally genetic
modification (winged pigs). The final chapters do a great job of helping the
Western reader see these threats through the eyes of the non-Western world, acknowledging
the reality of their fears without necessarily agreeing with them. He forecasts
that while the Anglosphere will continue to dominate global trade, it will find
accommodation with non Western opponents until assimilation overwhelms their
resistance – in other words, business as usual.
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