America's greatest days lie ahead – provided she is true to herself
A generation from now, Americans will be richer, more leisured, healthier and longer-lived than ever. That sentence could have been written at any time since the Mayflower landed (at least of the settlers; it was a different story for the indigenous tribes). It would always have prompted scepticism; and it would always have been true.
These days, it is a sentiment we rarely hear, which is all the more reason to pay attention when we do. In America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century, James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus begin by conjuring a cheerful vision of the United States in 2040. Most Americans will be self-employed: the very notion of a job, in the sense that existed from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, will almost have disappeared. A tiny number of retirees will receive state pensions, but most will instead have settled for lump-sum payments during the massive fiscal restructuring of the late 2020s. Technological change – self-driven cars, additive and subtractive manufacturing, advances in healthcare – will have facilitated an easier, more dispersed, more individualistic lifestyle. Commuting to work will be highly unusual, and the population will have spread itself across a providentially roomy continent. The federal government will have been reduced to little more than guaranteeing an internal single market and running defence and foreign policy. Foreign policy itself will be neither imperialist nor isolationist: an Anglosphere alliance will form the core of a Nato that has been expanded to other continents.
Set against the massive corpus of dystopian literature – Mark Steyn’s After America is by far the best and most enjoyable of the genre – such a vision may look naïve. But when we ponder human history up to the present, it’s entirely plausible.
Ever since the discovery of specialisation and trade, the lot of mankind has been improving. On the most basic metrics – longevity, literacy, infant mortality, homicide rates, calorie intake, height – things keep getting better. For thousands of years, the amelioration was so gradual as to be barely perceptible. Then, around 350 years ago, beginning in the Anglosphere, which took free contract and property rights furthest, it accelerated dizzily.
But here’s the odd thing. Every mile along that happy road has been accompanied by predictions of doom. Every generation applauds its Jeremiahs and its Cassandras: those writers who forecast that the good times are about to come to an end. The precise nature of the apocalypse changes with fashion – over-population, under-population, asteroid strikes, AIDS, uncontrolled immigration, energy shortages, drug-resistant superbugs, global cooling, global warming, nuclear winter, falling sperm-counts, rising sea-levels, bird flu, swine flu – but the underlying argument is always the same, namely "This time it’s different".
As the great Lord Macaulay put it a century-and-a-half ago:
We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who say society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days, but so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason.
Declinism sells. It touches some deep part of us that enjoys being titillated with horror or guilt. A writer who suggests that things will carry on getting better – patchily, sporadically, unexcitingly, but better none the less – will struggle to find a publisher. In fact, the only major exception I can think of is Matt Ridley, whose magnum opus, The Rational Optimist, is among the most important books of the decade.
Because of this lopsidedness, Bennett and Lotus haven’t yet had anything like the acclaim they deserve. They make a compelling argument that Anglosphere societies are uniquely well placed to benefit from the technological changes now underway, because of the emphasis they place on individualism.
James Bennett, by the way, is the man who invented the Anglosphere. I don’t mean that he coined the word, which was first used in a science fiction novel two decades ago. I mean that he popularised the concept of a cultural union of English-speaking democracies based on personal liberty, local autonomy, private ownership, free enterprise, small government, the rule of law, and the political inheritance of Magna Carta and the English and American Bills of Rights.
Regular readers will find that notion familiar, but these authors have one great advantage over me. All my great-grandparents were born in the British Isles. When I talk of the peculiar inheritance of the English-speaking peoples, some critics hear nothing but English chauvinism. Bennett and Lotus, by contrast, have only one Anglo grandparent between them. What they are writing about is plainly a cultural rather than an ethnic patrimony.
Here is a powerful and persuasive book. I confess to using the phrase "powerful and persuasive" in the sense that most bloggers do, to mean "agrees with me". The authors have drawn on the same sources that I most frequently turn to: the brilliant Cambridge historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane; Oxford’s James Campbell, the supreme authority on late Anglo-Saxon England; David Hackett Fischer and Kevin Phillips, whose histories of the United States contextualise the great republic within the Anglosphere continuum. They have returned, too, to the foremost Victorians, notably Stubbs, Freeman and Maitland, who fell out of fashion during the twentieth century, but whose truths will endure when more recent interpretations have been found wanting. I think I also detect Macaulay’s elegant spoor, though he isn’t cited directly. And, of course, they pay due reverence to America’s founders, above all Jefferson – whose words were unfailingly wise, even if his deeds didn’t always match them.
They have built on these writers through years of what one might call open-source history: a continuous process of blogging and online discussion that accumulates facts and arguments faster than a researcher would have imagined possible a decade ago.
Their conclusion? That English, later Anglosphere, exceptionalism, is very real. That the rise of our language and culture to their current unprecedented dominance – what one commentator terms "Anglobalisation" – is based on a series of properties that are either unique to the English-speaking peoples, or shared only with a handful of kindred cultures in northwestern Europe. Among these properties are the common law, representative government, Protestantism, dispersed landownership, civil associations separate from the state and – of particular interest to these authors – the unusual nature of the family.
They show that the Anglosphere dispenses with the extended family structures which, in most places, have legal as well as cultural force. In many societies, the peasant family has traditionally been treated as a kind of collective landowner, within which there are reciprocal responsibilities. Children, even in adulthood, have been expected to work on the family plot, receiving board and lodging. Marriages are typically arranged, and daughters-in-law come under the authority of the head of their new household. Even when the law recognises individual autonomy, custom is often slow to follow.
The Anglosphere scarcely resembles the Eurasian landmass in its family structures. Our notion of the family is limited and nuclear. Most English-speakers in most centuries wanted to set up home on their own, independently, with just their spouse and children – although economic circumstances did not always allow that aspiration to be fulfilled.
The notion that the limited family underpins Anglosphere exceptionalism – which draws heavily on the work of the French anthropologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd – is intriguing. I see the cultural difference all around me in the European Parliament. In most Continental states, your social life is largely taken up with your extended family: you have an endless stream of weddings and christenings to go to, sometimes of very distant cousins. Britons and Americans, by contrast, expect to leave their parental home in their teens, either to go to university or to work. We make friends away from home, and they become the core of our social life. Indeed, the word "friend" carries more force in English than in many European languages, in which it is bestowed quickly and generously, but often means little more than what we mean by a Facebook friend. When a Spaniard says of someone "es muy amigo mío", he simply means that he gets on with the chap.
I’m not saying that the Anglosphere model is morally superior. The extended family offers a warmth and reassurance that we miss. From at least the fifteenth century, foreign visitors were repelled by the way English children sought apprenticeships away from home, leaving their parents to hire labourers for wages in their place. Today, the readiness with which we put our parents in homes horrifies the Italians, let alone the Chinese.
The point of the book is not to laud or criticise the Anglosphere’s nuclear family, but to show why it is immediately responsible for the individualistic culture that we share with only a handful of lands (notably the Nordic countries and the Netherlands). It made possible capitalism, because economic relationships were primarily mediated through cash rather than family obligations. It facilitated the industrial revolution, because people did not feel tied to their family plots. It opened up vast new landmasses to settlement, as children set out to establish their own nuclear families. It encouraged the assimilation of immigrants, who could make their way as individuals (though some first-generation Americans understandably struggle to adjust to the unfamilial attitudes of their children). It explains why we hanker after our own little plots, instead of living in neatly stacked apartments – or, to flip it about, it explains the suburbs that foreign visitors find so ugly and vulgar.
Bennett and Lotus show that the Anglosphere’s individualism, the characteristic that overseas writers most remark upon, often negatively, is an increasing advantage as the world adjusts to the communications revolution.
Ah, you say, but what about our debt levels? What about the mess of the last five years? What about the way we’re being outgrown by everyone else (except the Eurozone)? How are we supposed to get from our present condition to this happy vision of 2040? How do we transition from the centralised, industrialised America 2.0 to the libertarian America 3.0?
Bennet and Lotus answer with an honesty that no politician dares indulge. The accumulated debt level in the United States is now so colossal that it is impossible for the authorities to honour their obligations. Some creditors – that is, people who hold bonds or expect pensions – will lose money. The trick will be to get this default out of the way as cleanly as possible, and to spread the losses as equitably as possible. As in any bankruptcy, practical considerations matter more than abstract questions of moral desert, and creditors should be encouraged to see that agreeing to a partial loss is better risking everything. Obviously, the federal Government can’t go bankrupt – there is no higher authority to administer the bankruptcy – but the process should be similar. The authors call it the Big Haircut, and stress that, in order for it to be credible – that is, in order to convince everyone that it was not the first of many write-offs – the structural causes of the original fiscal collapse would need to be removed: government programmes wound up, federal responsibilities devolved or terminated, social security entitlements privatised.
Is any of this realistic? Well, ponder the alternative. The United States cannot sustain its debts, which have passed the point where they can be inflated away. When we have eliminated the impossible, Watson, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
“Things can’t carry on like this,” say conservatives, and they’re right. But, for some reason, they always say it grumpily, despairingly. Be of good cheer, my friends. If things can’t carry on like this, they won’t.
Anyway, you’ll enjoy this book. Congratulations to the authors, and thanks to the excellent Roger Kimball for publishing it.
So long and thanks for all the clicks
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