h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Another Point of View

(originally written in October 2004)

In Octobe 2004 we watched American Generals in Iraq congratulating themselves over their latest victory, their ‘success’ in Falluja.

It was announced with exactly the same brash confidence and assurance that they had announced victory over Saddam Hussein the symbolic toppling of a statue in Bagdad and Dubbya announcing (from the safety of an aircraft carrier) that they had achieved what they had set out to achieve.

However, that was twenty months previously and – even then – one might have been forgiven for asking ‘what victory’, why are they still there if they are victorious, how many more victories will they need before they win?’

Little was said of the fact American troops in Falluja had already needed to be re-deployed to Mosul and elsewhere. They hadn’t defeated anybody, they hadn’t had a victory, the enemy has just moved elsewhere. The war wasn’t over - it had barely begun.

Now – nearly four years later – they are still no nearer any ‘victory’. All the talk is on ‘getting out’ but – of course – getting out in a way that will not be seen as a humiliating defeat and a complete waste of time, effort, money and countless lives, not to speak of the total destruction of a country. For what?

There is no question that the Americans did an excellent job in flattening Falluja (and many other places), including a hospital and many of the homes of perfectly innocent people. This was all justified as ‘necessary collateral damage’ in order to get one man and a few of his followers, who are perceived and portrayed as a mortal threat to the United States. It was merely ‘unfortunate’ they weren’t there at the time.

There is was no doubt then (as there is no doubt now), that as a result of the destruction, there would be plenty of work there for Harry Burton ‘rebuilding’ Iraq at the American taxpayers’ expense.

With equal certainty, the American forces continued to move on and flatten the next place where they felt threatened until the futility of it all began to dawn and they withdrew to their Harry Burton bunkers and sulked as they gorged themselves on Harry Burton provided fare.

Nobody doubted the American might. No country on earth could withstand the onslaught of their vast superiority in both conventional and unconventional weapons. But they could no more win the war in Iraq than they could in Vietnam or Somalia.

The question arises, ‘why don’t they learn?’ America didn’t lose a single set piece battle in Vietnam but they lost the war. America persisted in exactly the same approach in Iraq, more troops, bigger and better weapons and all without the slightest attempt to try and understand their perceived enemy.

Four years on and they still don’t even begin to understand.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in American political thinking. Just as the American military think that spending billions of dollars on more and more sophisticated and deadly weaponry, victory will be assured, the American government still persist in thinking that they can buy the people.

“Anyone can be bought if the price is right.”

Maybe that is right in America. $25 million is a lot of money in anyone’s book but not one single Afghan, Pakistani, Iranian or whoever, ever came forward with one iota of information as to the whereabouts of Osama Bin Ladin. It is inconceivable that this is simply because nobody knows where he is.

It isn’t simply because those that do know, have such a devotion for the man that they won’t tell. It most certainly isn’t because they don’t need the money. It is, perhaps, because they have a fundamentally different basic ethos and think that what America is doing is wrong. No amount of money will change this.

If this is the case the only way that America could ‘win’ would be for them to kill every man woman and child in the country. No amount of bombing or pounding with tanks and artillery will change the minds of the people being bombarded, merely it will reinforce their beliefs and determination still further.

The Iraqis have nowhere else to go, the Americans do – just as in Vietnam, they can go home.

However, at the heart of the American misunderstanding lies a persecution complex – part of the puritanical side of America’s heritage, and dates back to the Founding Fathers’ very reason for going there in the first place. These attitudes became entrenched in American politics and were reinforced by the re-election of George W. Bush and his entourage of religious fanatics.

‘Puritans’ as a political entity largely disappeared after the 17th century, but the puritanical attitudes and beliefs have continued to exert a powerful influence on American society ever since.

On the good side the Puritans made a virtue of the very qualities that made America such an economic success. The concepts of self-reliance, frugality, industry, and energy, have all had a huge influence on modern American social and economic life.

The Puritans’ belief in education was equally important in the development of the European immigrant population of the United States as great innovators and thinkers. It is no coincidence that America can boast of more Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners than any other country (even though not one of them is a Native American).

The Puritans’ idea of governance through a ‘congregational, democratic church’ was the foundation of the country’s early politics and is the basis of modern American democracy.

There is however a darker side to Puritanism, one which predates the first American settlers. Puritanism as a political rather than religious philosophy is, perhaps, one of the most misunderstood.

History, as taught in British schools, portrays Puritanism as little more than a humourless, unsmiling cult of self-denial. Most children who studied this era at all remember little other than that grim faced ‘Roundheads’ went up and down the country, dressed in black, knocking the heads off statues in churches, and banning all forms of entertainment.

This drab view of Puritanism hardly equates with the conspicuous consumption of present day, Republican America – the ultimate consumer society.

What is NOT taught at school (either in the UK or the USA) is that Puritanism was first and foremost, the product of an economic transformation that came about with trade becoming international rather than local. Puritanism was the forebearer of globalisation.

Until the 17th century Britain was feudal, run entirely in the interests of the monarchy and the clergy – and very nice too, if you happened to be a monarch or a cleric. However, feudalism could, and usually did, exert total control over the exploitation of the lower classes, depending entirely on the benevolence of the incumbent monarch.

Nothing has changed at all. In all countries that are still feudal, the fate of the poor is still entirely in the hands of the ruler. There are precious few examples where the incumbent ruler has put more back into the country than into their own pockets (Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Makhtoum is one of the very few that I can think of and even he is not above criticism).

The Reformation and dissolution of the monasteries, in Britain, changed all that radically and irreversibly. It gave birth to an entirely new commercial class whose first reaction was to grab the monastic estates, after which they ‘enclosed’ all the land and evicted most of the inhabitants.

The poor got even poorer – not just monetarily but in a reduced ‘quality of life’. The early Puritans denounced this and tried to preach that man should be charitable, justice should be maintained and that exploitation should be punished.

This concept persisted throughout most of the 17th century and it was THESE beliefs that the Founding Fathers took with them to ‘New England’, when they thought they were fighting a losing battle at home. However, they also took with them a deeply ingrained feeling that they had been persecuted and driven out.

It is HERE that the seeds of America’s present day persecution complex were sown.

How did this come about?

Back home such characteristics and beliefs couldn't survive the onslaught of commercialism. Land enclosure created a hitherto unknown form of gambling, a manic craze for land speculation.

To control and cater for this new frenzy sophisticated financial markets began to evolve and with these, the new commercial class’ obsession with speculation spread. Thus began the concepts of stock markets and futures and with them, all the sophisticated rules and tools of banking and accountancy that eventually led to fiascos like Enron and WorldCom.

Calvinism was a new and different form of Puritanism. It became the preferred religion of the new commercial class - the traders, the industrialists, the bankers and the moneylenders. Calvin taught just what they wanted to hear -that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with money and that commercialism was not unchristian.

Money could be used to the glory of God, therefore money must be good. If money is good, it must be part of God’s Holy Ordinance.

Calvin gave the commercial classes what the old order could not: a theological justification for commerce. Puritanism - purification - was an personal affair, a matter between you and God, and from this doctrine, the doctrine of ‘individual responsibility’, the late Puritans forged a totally new theology.

The traditional Christian belief of 'blesséd are the poor', was not just turned upside down, it was scrapped - totally. The argument was simple and had (to them) an irrefutable logic - "If money was good, lack of it must be bad."

Poverty was no longer a misfortune – it was God’s condemnation for the moral failings of the individual. Wealth was no longer something to be regarded with suspicion – the right for the privileged few – but a blessing from God, a reward for the sacrifice, the hard work, the determination and strength of mind.

It was but a short and easy step to the final concept of the early 18th century Puritans, to tie their religious ideals of personal accountability and reward to their commercial ones of compensation for hard work and dedication. If God blessed traders with successful business, it followed logically that success for the individual in commerce must be good for the general public as a whole. The fact that the rich got rich at the expense of the poor, who got poorer, did not matter - it was their fault and God’s hily ordinance

These austere and utterly ruthless businessmen became (and have remained to this day) the new ruling class. They had an unshakeable belief, both in themselves. They had an unshakeable belief that they had ‘God on their side’.

From then on money and commerce ruled. The world became a place to be conquered - commercially, not as something to be enjoyed. Globalisation meant just that – total domination of the world.

The sufferers – the poor – never had much of a voice but even then, there were protests – pitiful cries of despair. So what better way of distracting people’s thought from the poverty of the lower classes than to pour scorn on public support for the poor? Helping the poor only made them lazier and drove them even further from God. What they needed to do was to work.

What better way to justify such actions than to berate any form of moral deviation and pursue sodomites, fornicators, adulterers or any other forms of sexual license? Are we really any different today? Isn’t the present attack on the rights of women to abortion, much the same?

The growth of the British (and other European) Empire is a vast, controversial and separate subject and there is no intention to even try and address the matter here. However – there is one important aspect of it that is relevant to the argument put forth here, and that is that, with its expansion came the need to JUSTIFY the wholesale slaughter and repression of entire nations.

Although Calvin’s teachings could be adapted to suit the commercial classes’ (the new capitalists) repression of the poor in Britain they didn’t lend themselves to the justification of colonial expansionism abroad.

Puritanism is – in one respect – one of the most elitist of all the monotheist religions. In Puritanism, you do not earn salvation by just signing up as you do with most forms of monotheism. In Puritanism, salvation is reserved for the good, the hardworking and the righteous – or in their eyes – the rich. This made it hard to conquer the world in the name of religious faith even if ‘having God on your side’ did help – a bit. They needed something else.

FEAR. FEAR gave them all the justification they ever needed.

FEAR of the unknown, FEAR of ‘different’ races and – of course – mortal FEAR of the ungodly. Xenophobia is probably the easiest natural human trait to manipulate – well above those of greed and self-interest.

The traders went in first and could justify almost any atrocity they committed with the excuse of FEAR, even though they were some of the most fearless men in the history of mankind. Their philosophy was simple - ‘Get them before they have a chance to get you’.

But in the end, British Colonialism failed, and part of this failure was due to its attempts to use fear – as a political tool – on the natives. Whilst it is easy enough to engender fear within your own clan – it is NOT so easy to do it with a clan that you have just raped and pillaged – they have a tendency not to entirely trust you. Even so, it took them around 300 years to discover that they simply could not win.

Even in India – the jewel in the crown – and the one place that Britain colonised where we actually ‘liked’ the natives. In the end, even the desperate attempts to appease them, with the building of New Delhi and their own parliament buildings, failed. However nice we tried to be to them, however much we tried to show them that we really cared for India (and yes – I am well aware that there were a multitude of wrongs as well), the basic fact was that the Indians didn’t want us there.

The British had learnt nothing. They didn’t realise that they had never entirely forgiven the French for invading Britain in 1066. And this is just one of the things that the Americans have missed entirely.

The other was that the British Empire builders discovered pretty very early on that it was impossible to colonise a new land and then sit back and reap the benefits. To have any control over their newly subjugated population they had to instil in them a fear of their neighbours and what better way than to keep them occupied protecting themselves from the threat of a different enemy.

It is exactly the same fear that the Puritan settlers in America used to justify the systematic slaughter of the Native American Indians. It was exactly the same use of fear that enabled them to set one Indian tribe against another. It is exactly the same fear that, in the 21st century, is being used to justify the expansion of the New World Empire. It is exactly the same fear that is used to set sect against sect and Iraqi against Iraqi.

The simple misunderstanding is that most of us are perfectly well aware of the shortcomings of and problems with our immediate neighbours and we don’t need a marauding bunch of total strangers who know absolutely nothing about the people, the country or the history, to come along and tell us what we should be doing.

As America desperately struggles to find any excuse to invade Iran, the situation grows more terrifying by the day. It is said that America is in the grip of neo-fascism, but it is not. America it is in the grip of a neo-Puritanism. The rhetoric is not that of Europe in the 1930’s, but it is terrifyingly reminiscent of the worst rhetoric from Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.

America thinks it leads the world in communication technology and global connectivity. They should be striving to encourage people to understand each other, not fuel basic human fears and prejudices.

Thanks for this Pedantic. I enjoyed reading it and I agreed with every part of your analysis. Except, perhaps, in your discussion of America's hopelessness when fighting wars where technological superiority is overwhelming but ineffective - I think this is reminiscent of Imperial Rome's sclerotic final days.

Also, perhaps, the connection could have been stressed more that the belief in Calvin's doctrine of predestination - success in this world meaning being one of God's predestined chosen ones, the only ones who will enter heaven - led to the scramble to do well materially (and in terms of power as a nation - God Bless America) and avoid the undeserving and unchosen poor (devil take the hindmost - literally) as an indication to others and to oneself of one's personal favour before God. But you can't do everything in a simple h2g2 posting. Well done indeed. Best posting I've seen for ages.

Jab

Thank you.

I'm not quite sure 'how' you disagree with me on ' America's hopelessness when fighting wars, but I agree with you, it is reminiscent of the decline of the Roman Empire.

I suppose that I could have made a bit more of 'predestination, the "God endowed the white race with the right ..... " but NOT doing so was deliberate in that I was trying to emphasis the 'fear' aspect of it.

However, and as you say, it is not a definitive analysis, just a personal point of view and I thank you again for taking the trouble to read it as it was meant.

Fear - I was just emphasising the relationship between public show of predestination in the pursuit of money power and goods, and the private fear of not being predestined except for damnation which underlay it at the beginning and still does in the moral outlook of the culture, (greed is good etc.)

Sorry if I gave you the impression I disagreed with you, Pedantic - it was no more than a matter of nuance or of adding my ha'pennyworth. It was remarkable, over quite a long posting, how much I agreed with it, actually. It should be more widely read.

Jab

"I agreed with every part of your analysis. Except,...."

Now I really am being pedantic!!

Seriously though - I do take your point and, in writing the piece, I edited that aspect of it out (mostly) as my argument just became too convoluted (I still think that the whole thing is probably too long, which might explain why you are the only person to comment!!

Anyway, I am happy that you agree with some of it - I normally get the reaction 'Oh gawd - there he goes again'!

I agree with this analysis of Puritanism, and I don't think all British history teachers are ignoring the question of religion and the rise of capitalism.

Carl Jung thought that Protestant cultures displayed far more destructiveness than their Catholic neighbours because of the basic oppressiveness of the `Protestant Work Ethic'.

He points out in one book (Think it was `Memories Dreams and Reflections') that Mardi Gras had fallen out of favour with the non-Catholic Christians. This is not just because Puritanism discourages people from dressing up and enjoying themselves.

He argued that during Carnival time it is perfectly acceptable to disrespect your boss or your neighbour, and points out that this is an escape valve from oppressive social stress.

I've got some personal experience of these different attitudes, having lived in Spain for a few years in the 1990s. Being unemployed never seemed to be stignatized in the way it has been in the U.K. and tghe USA. These two devils collude in the idea that all you have to do is pay your mortgage and you can acquire social rank. Looking after your neighbour gets displaced in favour of `Charitable giving'. This isa far worse in the U.K., where I think some of the worst excessive drinking is a reaction against the hypocritical sanctimony of some sections of the media, especially the `news' .

Well that's my rant for today. If the media in the U.K. actually accepted the idea that we had the right to aspire to life, love and happiness, instead of taking potshots at social transgression, I am sure that the mental health of the nation would improve. More money for carnivals, I would say, but then that would be accepting that happy people are far less likely to be destructive people.

and a little

Not quite sure how to take that!?

What I was getting at was that under 'Bushism' one was getting NOT neo-conservatism but neo-puritanism. I think it was on last week's News Qiz that someone said 'we should look on houses as places that we live in - not just as investments' and the Western obsession with 'ownership' and money is what has brought about the present situation.

Anyway - I try and live within my means, even if that means that I sometimes have to borrow, to do so.

But thanks for the comment anyway.

I wasn't arguing against you, PBS, just wanted to explain why I do think capitalism and puritanism are quite closely related, but I don't really have any answers about the broader economic arguments.

I just think that the subtext of the latest `crisis' of capitalism is that we can't afford to keep spending the lion's share of the world's resources on armaments and wars, but none of the G12 or whatever number it is are prepared to address that honestly, or at least not openly.

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