America: Still Calvinistic?
The logic of Calvinism, as was explained in a previous article, “Politics According to Calvin” (published in the October 2008 issue of The Angelus), inhibits proselytizing, except accidentally, for the very simple reason that it is not a sinner’s place to convert sinners. Hence it is not the spirit of conquest, but rather of isolationism that comes naturally to Calvinists–though they might be willing to define broadly the boundaries of the community within which it is legitimate to extend a Calvinist order. It is one thing for the pioneer to set out, Bible in one hand and rifle in the other, for the conquest of reputedly empty contiguous territories (unfortunately for the Indians), but for him to meddle in European affairs is another thing entirely, and quite blameworthy, as Monroe proclaimed. We should not forget that only decades ago the American people twice had to be propagandized to be drawn into world wars. Thus it is to other causes that the American expansionism of the 20th century and its current drive for global domination must be ascribed. Three things, I think, were necessary.
Jeffersonianism vs. Jacobinism
The first cause of 20th-century American expansionism is a confusion of the spirit of American democracy with that of Jacobin democracy. One cannot pin on Calvin the idea the men should be sovereign (recall that Jefferson had only contempt for “the multitude of swine” manipulated by “swindlers” who were, according to him, the leaders of the French Revolution). But at the same time, the same (Calvinist) logic requires that men obey no man (but God alone) and demands the consent of all to the institution of a human authority, preventing the exportation of the American Revolution by force (every people must be able to take care of itself).
The Jacobin ideology, on the contrary, upheld that there were not two sorts of sovereignty, only democracy being legitimate: quite logically did the French Revolution, not content to guillotine its own, undertake to convert Europe by means of Gribeaunal canons and massive assaults. Thus it was necessary to inject a dose of imperialist democracy, lethal for the original American republic, into the essentially provincial City solely occupied with its own business, as was the city of Calvin, in order to convert it to the crusades of Democracy against Tyranny.
Capitalism
Secondly, I do not see Calvinism as the source of the economic expansionism supported by the United States but rather big industrial capitalism (which developed after the death of the hypocrite Lincoln, with the controlled reconstruction of the South and the building of the transcontinental railroads) and, especially after a certain degree of development of the industrial monopolies, the quintessentially international banking and finance capitalism which, beginning in the 20th century, was to fill the coffers, if not of crusaders, then at least of their leaders—the Wilsons, Roosevelts, and other Cheneys—by giving them the means for their propaganda, their elections, their action, and, finally, their business. (Need it be reiterated that the Federal Reserve bank was baptized by Alexander Hamilton, himself an American of very recent importation, and which was fought until 1830 by the final inheritors of the properly Calvinist spirit, the Coopers and the Jacksons.)
The New Israel
To these causes must be added, thirdly, that America has increasingly become the policeman of the world inasmuch as it has resolved to be no longer solely a model people, but the new chosen people, the avatar of the ancient one enlarged to the dimensions of the New World and naturally vowed to its protection, as Mr. Bush recently declared to the Knesset: “Israel is not a nation of 7 million inhabitants; but when it goes up against terrorism and evil, Israel is 307 million strong.” The desire to control the sources of oil does not explain US Middle East policy. (Saddam Hussein had never refused to sell them any.) But obviously neither does Calvinism.
Implementation and Execution
As everyone knows, the Americans have become an economic world power and, following Max Weber, nothing should be more understandable since Calvinism is supposed to lead to capitalism. There’s nothing more Calvinistic, surely, than to want to transform the world, or at least to want to remodel the world of men, a world imbued with sin and which must be rebuilt to the glory of God.
But if there is something profoundly Calvinistic about this temporal ambition, still it should be understood that it was implemented in a strikingly un-Calvinistic way. I believe that it is appropriate to distinguish two periods in the history of this country divided by the War of Secession.
Before the War of Secession. There was an American society vowed from the outset to the economy for which Calvinism was directly responsible; it is the society that existed from its origin to the end of the War of Secession. What made for the strength of this original America was incontestably its Calvinist virtues: a certain self-confidence, self-reliance and thus application to work; the propensity to trade as the sole relation entirely natural to men completely independent of one another; being loath to complain or to ask for help; a good conscience in possessing his holdings. These were the virtues extolled to metaphysical heights by the Madisons and Jeffersons, the Emersons, Coopers, and Jacksons, not to mention the celebrated Thoreau. All of them are nourished by the Calvinist conviction that no sinner can ever completely trust another sinner, and that the individual has no better friend than himself, a conviction which made of the United States almost from its inception a nation of producers, merchants, financiers, and engineers. But with this decisive reservation: that all this activity be carried out without anything truly escaping the eye of the master. From Calvinism, one can deduce a nation of small and medium enterprises of every kind; a society of inventive, industrious, efficient citizens; a nation of pioneers always heading out farther West so that everyone can carve out a domain of which he can be the lord and master; but not a nation of gigantic industrial trusts dominated by financial groups. Big capital, salaried employees, and the unbridled quest for profit out of proportion with the desire for self-autonomy are as many signs of the exhaustion of the Calvinist social model. And that is why the triumph of Calvinism over the civilization of the South was not only a cultural catastrophe, but the occasion of the decline of Calvinism itself. Too big a field had opened up to appetites that the law no longer condemned in principle. Reconstruction and Westward Expansion worked hand in hand to take away from Calvinism its architectonic role in the structure of society.
The capitalist America of today only professes a veneer of Calvinism, until such time as a new wave of massive immigration with no belief in the melting-pot will achieve its complete extinction as a principle of legislation.
Traces in the Constitution. That being the case, there remains the US Constitution itself. In effect, the Calvinist inspiration at its origin cannot be denied: its fundamental dispositions (separation of powers, consent of the governed, etc.) proceed from a Calvinist pessimism, from the conviction that, short of being able to cure men of their vices, if one is to enable them to live in society, things must be arranged such that no one, and especially not the masses so easily swayed by passions, dispose of any power against which there is not arrayed a countervailing power.
Yet, it must be recognized that the democratic practice has naturally bent the direction of institutions presupposing that more virtuous and intelligent men govern those who are less so. In considering the competition of particular interests as the element in which the public life is played, and, consequently, by guaranteeing in some way their existence, Calvinism has involuntarily encouraged the ambitious to apply themselves to all the practices that enable their factions to prevail over others: cynicism and brutality (why wouldn’t everyone defend his own interest?) and hypocrisy (make the special interest pass for the common good) have spurred the appearance of techniques of campaigning, that is to say electoral machines, whose nerve can only be money and the goal of which is to lay hold on as much power as possible.
It is to be feared that today in the US, the private has triumphed over the public; that the res publica, the common weal, has become more and more a profitable business passing from one acquirer to another; that the chains with which Calvinism intended to bind human passions have been broken, and that thus even Calvinism itself has been consumed.
Traces in national habits. What remains of Calvinism in contemporary America? In the last analysis, it seems to me, there remain some mental habits, some acquired reflexes. Calvinism, at the beginning the religion of a minority of immigrants endowed by their religion with an uncommon energy, finished by imparting to the national character some of its most marked traits. It goes without saying that the past does not judge a future encumbered by the trend of a socializing multiculturalism and the homogenizing effects of finance and technology. But at the time these lines are written, one can ascribe to a Calvinism become largely unconscious at least two fundamental traits of the American personality.
Everyone Alone before God
Tocqueville, it seems to me, was mistaken, a victim of his French experience: it is not equality, but the protection of their individual independence that obsesses the Americans, and it is to this intemperate individualism, to this taste for personal self-sufficiency that should undoubtedly be attributed the failure among them of socialist ideas, to which they manifestly prefer the First and Second Amendments. The Americans nonetheless join to this individualism bordering on anarchy a sense of discipline touching on conformism.
I find it difficult not to see in this curious contradiction the sociological expression of that twofold Calvinist conviction that no man is better than another, but that, after all, everyman is alone before God. The well-brought-up man is submissive to God but chooses the church or the sect in which he will give Him thanks; the sinner needs discipline and rules, but there is no king who is not a tyrant and no nobility that does not oppress the people; the police officer is respected because he embodies the law but also because he is elected; there is no one more disciplined than an American on a freeway, but let no one presume to ask him without a warrant why he has a machine-gun on his back seat; Americans live in society, but their crowd is composed of solitary individuals. Thus everything happens as if beneath the liberty they adore, they see the devil that tempts them.
But it is not (as Tocqueville believed, good Christian Democrat that he was) that the spirit of religion sets limits to the spirit of freedom; it is rather, in a quite different way, that their religion even condemns them to a liberty without any other light than that of a few prohibitions, a liberty without any principle of interior moderation, which is like their destiny but which they cannot not perceive as fundamentally flawed. The contradiction has entered into their morals, where it has taken root and even survived the weakening of the religious sentiment—but at the price of a certain mental [dis]equilibrium or a certain sentiment of guilt. The success of psychoanalysis in the US is not by chance.
Moralizing
A second and final example of the survival of Calvinism: the propensity to moralize and impart lessons, or else a vague religiosity proceeding from the more or less conscious certitude of constituting the ultimate term of human progress, a progress willed by God. An American academic under Reagan even maintained the idea that the American liberal society represented the final stage of human history, that with it history had ended. The Americans have a natural propensity to thank God for being American (“How can you live in Paris?” a cultivated lady exclaimed to me).
Expansion
Whence their disarming naiveté of good will, borne of a confidence in an exceptional and quasi-messianic destiny. Already in 1628, the man who would become Governor Winthrop, leading the first great wave of immigrants comprising Puritans for the most part, exhorted the future colonists about to disembark in Massachusetts to be mindful that they were called to found “a city on a hill,” to fulfill a providential mission.
This attitude has remained though the modalities have changed. For if in the past the American people asserted its vocation to constitute a model people, the model was made to be freely admired and its imitation left to the discretion of sinners able or not to see the light.
What has happened is that the good American conscience of the beginning has invested an expansionism “originating elsewhere,” thus perpetuating the feeling of a right which, in the beginning, was not that of invading peoples supposedly endowed by nature with the right of self-determination.
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