The Fate of the West

In 1903, Theodore Herzl examined Britain’s colonial efforts in Egypt and concluded “English colonial methods would either destroy the Empire or lay the foundations for world domination — one of the most fascinating alternatives of our age — we would like to see, 50 years hence, how it turns out.” What Herzl observed were British institutions — cultural and political — taking root in Egypt, and that such institutions would so improve Egypt that the nation would either be a great contribution in a network of British colonies or its success would fuel a drive for independence. Herzl perhaps overlooked Britain’s purpose for colonizing Egypt up through the Near East. As Lord Cecil commented to his fellow Cabinet members fourteen years later: “There is not going to be any great catch in it … we shall simply keep the peace between the Arabs and the Jews. We are not going to get anything out of it. Whoever goes there will have a poor time.” Two great motives of colonization — profit and population control (as in exporting undesirables) — were absent in the British Near East efforts; the lone objective for these efforts was regional security. Lord Cecil’s primary motive was to construct a balanced world order that ensured lasting peace and regional stability; he was an inveterate pacifist and architect of the League of Nations. Herzl and Cecil were congenitally wrong as they both lived the Icarian Victorian hubris that was grounded in a faith that believed that with enough effort and organization and good intention, the world could be remade.

As evidenced by the last five decades in the Near East, Herzl’s dream of European acculturation and Cecil’s seemingly cynical solution by a balance of powers both proved wrong. The efforts to acculturate the Near East to Western values were repelled by resurgent Islam before reaching a critical mass that would enable secular humanism to flourish, and the designs to establish a stable balance of power were thwarted by an unstable want of power. This conspiracy of foreign culture and the realities of greed returned the Near East from whence it came: a cycle of grasping despots seeking empire and nascent empires seeking despots. That Herzl and Cecil were exposed as naive in their hopes for a stable Near East is one of many utopian dreams dashed on the rocks of history, culture and economics. The greatest utopian dream of the era, the progressive welfare state, is now proving incompatible with a final recently revealed lesson from the Near East.

The West is discovering that two of its primary projects over the last eight decades, social welfare and multiculturalism, are mutually exclusive, and that the latter is lethal to the former. The initial evidence can be derived from a cursory observation of the common characteristics of seemingly successful national social welfare programs such as Scandinavia, Japan, and Canada. They are suspiciously homogenous, thus suggesting that social welfare programs are only politically viable in homogenous communities. A political and financial commitment to social welfare is a commitment to the community, which is a cohesive group with self-evident shared values and interests. The recent Nordic rejection of immigrants and German assertion that refugees are only temporary is an acknowledgment that these countries must choose between the community that enables social welfare programs and a new community in which self-evident shared values and interests no longer exist.

The final recently revealed lesson from the Near East is that laissez-faire conservative governance is not the revealed preference of Europeans (or, in fact, any modern advanced nation aside from the United States). All such nations, given the option, choose generous social welfare policies over some kind of free market libertarianism. Instead, laissez-faire conservative governance is a response to multiculturalism, or diversity, or a lack of unifying national culture. Such culture can typically be found in common language, common attitudes towards law, education, and morality, and a common Church. These attitudes are implicitly agreed upon and explicitly demonstrated by national institutions, from Church to monarch. The United States has historically been the most laissez-faire conservative advanced modern nation precisely because it has always lacked national institutions. Instead of being one nation, the United States has from birth been a federation of several nations, each developing its own culture and its own degrees of social welfare (not to mention attitudes toward social welfare). Each American demonstration of Emersonian self-reliance and rugged individualism is evidence that a cohesive national culture necessary for social welfare governance does not exist. Emerson’s transcendentalism was viewed by many as some kind of atheistic rejection of religion, but it was rather an acknowledgment that Americans find no great cultural resonance in any established church (which perhaps ironically makes the American religious experience more personal and, in the end, more religious than the European one precisely because Americans seek religion for its own sake and not for its ability to express and inform national culture). The great waves of new immigrants washing ashore in Europe are teaching Europeans about the American experience; utopian social welfare dreams require homogeneity in order to have a chance of success.

Scotland’s recent independence vote was a remarkable encapsulation of the narrative: the most recent Western project — multiculturalism — appears to be in the process of destroying the welfare states that the ravages of war and seemingly unsustainable debt could not. The inclination toward social welfare requires a sense of community in order to inspire the sense of taking care of one’s own, of tending of one’s extended family. Scotland’s push for independence was viewed by some as an effort to expand its social welfare governance; this view is accurate but only in the context of Scotland’s independence as an effort to maintain Scotland’s homogeneity. The vote for Scottish independence was a referendum on the U.K.’s multiculturalism, and the voting demonstrated that the Scottish rejected multiculturalism, while, it could be argued, so did the English — jettisoning Scotland would only make the U.K. more diverse and leave the Anglo-Saxons of the United Kingdom feeling abandoned by those who substantially contribute to their communal identity. Without Scotland, the British multicultural project would become increasingly untenable, and Scotland would be free to thrive in the homogeneity for which the English yearn. The narrative of Scotland’s independence was but a chapter in the larger history now being written; as Europe’s homogeneity is threatened, so to is the communal prerequisite for social welfare governance.

Delving further into the question of institutions, community and social welfare, we can explore the purpose of one of colonial British North America’s earliest institutions: Harvard College.

First, the Puritans who founded Harvard had a more intense sense of social welfare than any nation does today. Each village was responsible for their citizens — legally responsible. If someone born in Dedham committed a crime in Boston, then that person was often deported to Dedham — they were responsible.[1] Criminals were often sentenced to their towns — and the cost was borne by the town. Each town was fully responsible that its citizens were appropriately educated, healthy, had jobs, were moral citizens, etc. A criminal or a man without a job or crop failure was a town-wide problem.

By 1700, Puritans were already publishing histories about their City Upon a Hill experiment, exploring the failures and successes of their efforts. Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (which means anything from “Great Works of Christ in America” to “Great Things about Christ’s America”) was published in seven books across two volumes in London in 1702, and he writes in detail about the founding of Harvard. With little money, they could launch a college similar to many in Europe, but, as Mather notes, his grandparents rejected the idea:

’Tis true, the University of Upsal in Sueden, hath ordinarily about seven or eight Hundred Students belonging to it, which do none of them live Collegiately, but board all of them here and there at Private Houses; nevertheless the Government of New-England, was for having their Students brought up in a more Collegiate Way of Living.

Uppsala University, about 35 miles north of Stockholm and one of northern Europe’s leading universities, was widely known for being progressive and popular. And yet just as paper money failed in Sweden (Wittmacher’s “credit paper”), Mather believes that Uppsala’s lack of a “Collegiate Way of Living” somehow fundamentally misses the purpose of education; Uppsala, like most universities at the time, did not have “student housing.” In both Uppsala University and “credit paper,” the fault can be found in an apparent inability to develop and maintain community trust. A “Collegiate Way of Living” was a Puritan social ideal that would define American higher education for centuries; the process of educating the youth was not merely instilling knowledge, as it was in the University of Upsal, but rather a Puritan education necessarily included the students living, working, learning, eating and playing together.[2]

In order for them to “live Collegiately,” they must learn collegiately in order to bond with fellow students, develop a group consciousness, and both learn and pass on the values of Puritan life, which, above all else, entailed recognizing Winthrop’s argument that Puritans are “members of the same body.” This process results in community trust, which extended to the laws by which towns were formed. New England legislatures initially allotted land to groups, usually as congregations, so the basis of land allotment and thus colonial expansion was the community, not the individual. Then the congregation divided the land among congregation members, and even the lowest ranking member often received over 200 acres. Thus, the initial New England conception of civil and political enlargement was by small group, not by individual, which demonstrates that the Puritans considered small groups as the conduit for constituting government and culture. The Puritan ethos developed in part as a rejection of the nascent nation-states forming in Western Europe in the 17th century. These early nation-states were characterized by increasingly centralized power, authority, regulation and identity. Nationalism developed with the emergence of the nation-state, as the new authority required its own religion to engage and influence the populous. And the state would use this influence to increasingly invoke nationalism instead of Catholicism to stir the passions of the people. With ships sailing to trading posts along Western Africa and to destinations far across the Indian Ocean, European villages experienced increasing global commercialization wherein small farmers were buying from and selling to people they did not know. The decline of localized economies required a new conceptualization of commercial relationships, the economy, and the country, and this new conceptualization produced an identity that was national, and thus far beyond the local town, church, and economy.

So as the Europeans were inventing nationalism, the Puritans were inventing social welfare. Both require a community of shared values and interests (and thus, the features of one can be developed in the other), and both entail governance that fundamentally operates among of groups/communities and not atomized individuals. Hitler, while attempting to kill everyone, ended up killing nationalism, and with it the communal requirements of powerful nation-states.[3] Importantly, in order to build a stronger community, the Puritans explicitly rejected continental European education (and remade what is essentially a variant of a very English-Protestant education).[4] Puritans would argue that while they prioritized community over education (or, strictly speaking, knowledge transfer), Harvard became a secular academic powerhouse within a century.[5]

The choice before the West that is occurring now, whether it knows it or not, is social welfare governance or multiculturalism. This choice, and all its attendant friction, is characterized among its “globalist” and “nationalist” political factions, the Yellow Vests in France, the current government in Italy, and rising nationalists of Sweden.[6] Finland, Switzerland and others are actively considering replacing some or all social welfare programs with universal standard payments. Such programs are certainly wealth redistribution, but it’s more noteworthy what they are not: designed to engage the government to actively assist the poor. What they are not is informed on a cultural level, as they are perfunctory reflexive social welfare impulses instead of active engagement of the national community. Of course, financially such programs mostly benefit the middle class, who previously would receive little in poor assistance and now receive something like a partial tax refund. This is not a program intended to aid a community’s most needy but rather a capitulation to the impossibility of combining modern multiculturalism and social welfare governance.

But at its core, all of this friction is a question of institutions and community and as such are foundational questions for any civilization.

The choice before America in the 2016 election as represented by Donald Trump (and, not ironically, the Cuban Cruz, the black Carson and the great grandson of German immigrants Paul) and (ironically Jewish) Bernie Sanders. The choice, however, is between a more laissez-faire America and an impossible social welfare America; Sanders’ vision for America requires a national sense of community that does not and has never existed (apart from perhaps ephemerally for a few days after 9/11 and other national tragedies). Laissez-faire Republicans would turn America to a nation that perhaps some find distasteful, but Sanders’ America will cause the kind of social dislocation that results from attempted forced cultural cohesion [7] — previous similar efforts include 1920s Germany and 1950s Algeria and the colonial Egypt that Herzl viewed. America can withstand mass immigration; she has no national institutions to destroy (the 1830s attempt to implement public schools as a national institution was never successful). America is built to withstand cultural turbulence; it lacks a church and monarch and ancient customs to be threatened, so its cultural decentralization was a necessary strength to compensate for the lack of national community. But Sanders’ social welfare vision requires community, and thus is a threat to coerce a community (America exists in part because a critical mass of Europeans refused to be part of a coerced Anglican community). And so America has long been the most conservative Western nation, as it has long been the least homogenous — and that will not change by any onslaught of welfare programs. What will change is the American attitude toward its government. Younger voters report losing faith in the “American dream,” and to a significant degree this is an acknowledgment that the cohesive nation (which is not the same as a cohesive community) and operating structure under which to succeed is declining. The tipping point — the Boston Massacre moment — occurs when Americans can point to specific government actions that undermine national cohesion. Sanders’ welfare utopia and its required coerced community would be that Boston Massacre moment.

And Theodore Herzl would agree. His vision for a cohesive community was also a vision of a highly homogenous community; he was the architect of Zion, the vision for a Jewish state, which was a cohesive group with self-evident shared interests — which is also what Sweden was until recently, what Scotland desired to be, and what America never has been. Each has developed a solution for establishing a government responsive to their type of community, and each now is faced with existential decisions. On the surface, Lord Cecil was terribly wrong about the potential for a stable balance of power. But of greater consequence is a result he never considered: instead of British stability being exported to the Near East, could the instability of the Near East be imported to Britain? Further, can the social welfare community be coerced onto an America that hasn’t the necessary national community, and thus what were viewed as socially stabilizing institutions of Europe prove to be destabilizing in America? To paraphrase Herzl, the answers to these questions will either destroy the West or lay the foundations for another Western millennium — one of the most fascinating alternatives of our age — and we won’t have to wait 50 years to see how it turns out.

[1] See Davenport’s frequent deportations back to New London — https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/false-spirits-jacobin-jackals-43c2be64fb73

[2] I think it can be reasonably argued that the primary purpose of Harvard was not education but rather community-building. The Puritan effort of build a residential college was audacious and mildly insane given that they were simultaneously attempting to carve the basics of a civilization out of untamed forests.

[3] This contrasts with the requirements of empires; for example, as the Ottoman Empire attempted to evolve into a nation-state in the mid-19th century, religion and ethnicity began to become important in ways they never previously were; these communal requirements accelerated as the new Turkey took form in the 1920s.

[4] In the 17th and 18th centuries, Oxford and Cambridge existed not to educate but to build communities. The great centers of learning were in Northern Europe and Scotland. Of course, the communities that Oxbridge were creating/perpetuating were elitist, and many Puritans viciously mocked Oxbridge (as finishing schools, whorehouses, etc) while also rejecting Continental education.

[5] By the 1750s, Harvard had left most of its European rivals behind. For example, when the Great Earthquake struck Lisbon, Europeans were wondering why God hated them so much while Harvard academics were postulating that perhaps the earth’s surface was composed of plates that moved. Smaller community-oriented liberal arts schools in the U.S. are derivatives of the Puritan vision while larger research schools are an import from 19th century Germany. And yet, those large American research universities tend to have prominent football and basketball teams — something non-existent in Europe — precisely because they believe that a university must have community — community is germane to the purpose of an education institution. QED: big-money college sports exist because of the Puritans.

[6] “Nationalist” is really the incorrect term in all these cases; it’s a question of the type of community each is trying to develop and that is usually a question not of what is desirable? but rather what is possible?

[7] Do note that this would work in some countries, particularly in Europe. That said, forced cohesion, from Turkey to communist countries — and China today — is often a recipe for genocide and related calamities. I suspect that there’s a misunderstanding re “Laissez-faire.” This does not mean ‘no community’ but rather means that the source of community is not government. The strongest social welfare programs that the world has ever witnessed — 17th and 18th century Puritan New England — thrived in a very low-government environment. The Puritans viewed greater governance as toxic to the community and its social welfare programs.

About Nathan Allen

Formerly of Xio Research, an A.I. appliance company. Previously a strategy and development leader at IBM Watson Education. His views do not necessarily reflect anyone’s, including his own. (What.) Nathan’s academic training is in intellectual history; his next book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense….