The American Civilizing Process

Stephen Mennell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745655383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since 9/11, the American government has presumed to speak and act in the name of 'civilization'. But isthat how the rest of the world sees it? And if not, why not?

Stephen Mennell leads up to such contemporary questions through a careful study of the whole span of American development, from the first settlers to the American Empire. He takes a novel approach, analysing the USA's experience in the light of Norbert Elias's theory of civilizing (and decivilizing) processes.

Drawing comparisons between the USA and other countries of the world, the topics discussed include:

• American manners and lifestyles
• Violence in American society
• The impact of markets on American social character
• American expansion, from the frontier to empire
• The 'curse of the American Dream' and increasing inequality
• The religiosity of American life

Mennell shows how the long-term experience of Americans has been of growing more and more powerful in relation to their neighbours. This has had all-pervasive effects on the way they see themselves, their perception of the rest of the world, and how the rest of the world sees them.

Mennell's compelling and provocative account will appeal to anyone concerned about America's role in the world today, including students and scholars of American politics and society.

I

‘American Civilization’

Since we are condemned as a nation to be a superpower, let a growing sense of history temper and civilize our use of that power.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr (2006)

In their response to the terrorist hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, political leaders and commentators in the United States and the rest of the world repeatedly referred to ‘civilization’ and ‘the civilized world’.

President George W. Bush, in a proclamation, declared that ‘Civilized people around the world denounce the evildoers who devised and executed the terrible attacks’.¹ Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke of a ‘war against civilization’ (BBC World Service, 12 September 2001, 14.20 GMT). Echoing him, former US Ambassador to Britain Philip Lader said the terrorist attacks had been ‘an attack on all civilization’ (Newsnight, BBC2, 12 September 2001). Speaking on behalf of the British government at a special sitting of the House of Commons, Prime Minister Tony Blair described the perpetrators of these hideous atrocities as enemies of the civilized world: ‘These were attacks on the basic democratic values in which we all believe so passionately, and on the civilized world.’ In response, the leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, said that democracy must always triumph over evil: ‘It is the responsibility of civilized countries everywhere to do whatever is necessary to prevent such atrocities ever happening again’ (<www.bbc.co.uk>, 14 September 2001). At the United Nations, the British Ambassador, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said that the events were ‘a global issue, an attack on modern civilization and an attack on the human spirit’. From Germany, Kurt Voigt of the Social Democratic Party promised his country’s ‘help in this common struggle against the evil in the world’: this was ‘a war against civilization, and we are with you’ (both in New York Times, 12 September 2001). Josef Joffe went further in a leader article in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit (13 September 2001): the terrorists, he wrote, were attacking America and Israel ‘as the spearhead of modernism and of Western civilization. They hate the free market, the liberal order, the individual pursuit of self-interest, the freedom of self-determination, the separation of Church and State.’ Here, ‘civilization’ is being used as a term of broad self-approbation for ‘us Western people’. The New York Times, in its leader on 12 September, admitted, however: ‘The distaste of Western civilization and culture that fuels terrorism is difficult to overcome.’

In the face of the repugnant events of 11 September 2001, it is easy to understand how people were drawn to use the concept of ‘civilization’ in this Manichaean way, as the antonym of ‘barbarism’, ‘savagery’ and plain ‘evil’. Yet even in the immediate aftermath, a few commentators were uneasy at its use. The Irish historian Joe Lee expressed it well:

The self-indulgent rhetoric of good versus evil, of ‘the civilized world’ versus the rest, is the mirror image of the jihad thinking of Muslim fundamentalism. The rhetoric of ‘the civilized world’ was commonplace a century ago to mean the white world. Blacks are now too visible in America for that to be said out loud. But there is still unfortunate potential for dehumanizing Muslims lurking beneath the surface of the Bush rhetoric, however little he may himself intend it. (Sunday Tribune, Dublin, 16 September 2001)

These misgivings were not without cause. In the days and weeks after the attacks, there were sporadic incidents of verbal abuse and violence against Muslims in America and other Western countries. Especially after President Bush’s gaffe in speaking of a ‘crusade’ against terrorism – an unwitting allusion to episodes in the history of the Middle Ages when, judged by modern standards, it is hard to say whether Islam or the Christian Europeans were more nearly ‘civilized’ – he and other Western leaders had later to go to some lengths to stress the peaceful character of most branches of Islam and the vast majority of Muslims.² The effect of their assurances was negated when, a little more than a year later, the United States invaded Iraq.

It was Susan Sontag who wrote what became the most celebrated rejection of the prevailing rhetoric about ‘civilization’:

The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. (New Yorker, 24 September 2001)

These passages are enough to show not only that the concept of ‘civilization’ and related ideas are still quite near the surface of modern political thinking, but also that connections remain between the ‘everyday’, relatively unreflected and the more technical, social scientific senses of the word. How the words ‘civilization’ and ‘civilized’ were used in the heat of the moment was very different from the technical meanings of those concepts that Elias developed in his theory of civilizing processes. One link between the everyday and technical, or what anthropologists (Headland et al., 1990) would call the ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ meanings of civilization, is that both are connected to means by which one group of human beings expresses its superiority over other groups. The scale of America’s historic achievements is such that Americans would not be human if they did not feel and express their collective pride. This pride has always involved a firm faith in progress, in things of all kinds having improved and become better, and in their continuing to improve and become better in the future. Irrepressible optimism is commonly recognized as a key American trait. It can be traced back at least to the beginnings of the American state in the era of the Enlightenment, the very period when the word ‘civilization’ came into use and started to acquire its range of meanings.

The Founding Fathers as philosophes

The Enlightenment, that great movement of eighteenth-century European thought marked by a growing faith in reason, science and humanity, comprised many local Enlightenments.³ Of these, the Enlightenment of the British colonies in North America was only one. It came relatively late, and – at least in the estimate of Peter Gay (1997 [1968]: 35) – was intellectually fairly minor when compared with the French, German or Scottish Enlightenments. In its long-term consequences for world history, however, the American Enlightenment was arguably the most important of all because several of the leading American intellects – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison – had an exceptional opportunity to implement their ideas. They played decisive parts in the American Revolution and in the formation of the American Republic. The most distinguished literary products of the American Enlightenment, moreover, were in the field of political and social thought.

Whatever else of their European heritage they believed they were casting off, the intellectual leaders of the American Revolution certainly did not abandon the concern with problems of ‘civilization’ characteristic of the Enlightenment. In the Declaration of Independence, when denouncing George III for ‘transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny’,⁴ they described him acting with ‘cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized nation’. Charles and Mary Beard (1942) traced how, from Thomas Jefferson in the early Republic to Robert MacIver in twentieth-century American sociology, Americans followed European discussions of ‘civilization’ and later of ‘culture’, contributed to them, and considered how these issues related to the United States.⁵ From an early date, a conception of ‘American civilization’ became bound up with a sense of American superiority over Europe – as well as of European Americans’ superiority over the Indians and blacks – just as in Europe ‘civilization’ gradually became a badge of superiority, first of upper-class people over the lower classes of European societies themselves and then of all Europeans over the natives of lands subjected to European colonialism. Moreover, while in America there was always a strong sense of human progress, this was combined with at least as strong a sense that the virtues of ‘civilization’ were, if not innate in every individual American, then at least inherent in the founding conditions of American society. In other words, Americans, like their European contemporaries, came to forget the process of civilization through which they had, over the generations, arrived at where they were, and to take the state of civilization very much for granted.

In all this, Thomas Jefferson (principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States) is highly significant, not so much because he was entirely typical of the founding generation – on the contrary, he was a rather extreme figure – but because the ideas with which he is associated have strongly endured in American political thinking.

‘Progress’

In Jefferson’s collected writings, the word ‘civility’ occurs half a dozen times, always in the sense of politeness or consideration for others. He uses ‘culture’ frequently, but only with the original agricultural meaning: the notion of culture and cultivation in the human and social sense was only just beginning to emerge in his lifetime (Williams, 1958; Goudsblom, 1980). ‘Civilization’, however, was almost a favourite word, which Jefferson employed about 50 times in publications and correspondence.⁶ While representing his newly independent country as Minister to France (1784–9), Jefferson had travelled extensively in Europe (Shackelford, 1995), meeting many leading intellectual figures, and he always read extensively. One of his acquaintances was the Marquis de Condorcet, whose Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1955 [1795]) traced nine stages of social development, starting from the lowest form of ‘savagery’ in which humans were barely better than other animals, and drew from this theory a vision of the infinite perfectibility of humankind. Not surprisingly, then, Jefferson uses ‘civilization’ in most of the senses current at the time in Europe – although not in the derogatory anti-French sense that would become prominent in Germany. Generally he uses the word to signify a peaceful, settled and technically advanced agricultural and commercial society such as the USA then was. Often the word occurs in conjunction with allusions to other symptoms of progress: ‘agriculture, manufactures and civilization’ (1907: III, 491); ‘improvements in arts and civilization’ (ibid.: IV, 185); ‘the progress of philanthropy and civilization’ (ibid.: IV, 17).

Perhaps Jefferson’s most vivid statement of his belief in progress is found in his vision of an imaginary journey from the far west of the USA to the more settled East:

Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our seacoast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day. I am eighty-one years of age; born where I now live, in the first range of mountains in the interior of our country. And I have observed this march of civilization advancing from the seacoast, passing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition, insomuch as that we are at this time more advanced in civilization here than the seaports were when I was a boy. And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth. (Ibid.: XVI, 75)

The famous correspondence⁷ between Jefferson and John Adams towards the end of their lives, after their reconciliation following political differences that had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, is highly revealing about currents of thought in the early Republic concerning matters of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, ‘progress’ and ‘human nature’ in Europe and America, and how these were connected to social and political arrangements. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and while the Napoleonic Wars dragged on, Adams expressed some doubt about the inevitability of human progress:

Let me ask you, very seriously my Friend, Where are now in 1813, the Perfection and perfectibility of human Nature? Where is now the progress of the human Mind? (Adams to Jefferson, 15 July 1813)

And, in a later letter:

I can only say at present, that it should seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm. (Adams to Jefferson, 2 February 1816)⁸

Yet the second and third presidents showed that they still shared an admiration for the achievements of the age of the Enlightenment. Jefferson concurred with Adams’s ‘eulogies on the eighteenth century’:

It certainly witnessed the sciences and arts, manners and morals, advanced to a higher degree than the world had ever seen. And might we not go back to the era of the Borgias, by which time the barbarous ages had reduced national morality to its lowest point of depravity, and observe that the arts and sciences, rising from that point, advanced gradually thro’ all the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, softening and correcting the manners and morals of man? (Jefferson to Adams, 11 January 1816)

These remarks show Jefferson’s characteristic philosophical idealism – he saw ideas and the growth of knowledge as the very cause of the softening of manners.

Fugitive government

The most important legacy of the Enlightenment faith in ‘human nature’ and in progress – especially American progress – that Jefferson retained, even when the bloody excesses of the French Revolution had shaken it in many others, was a preference for minimal government. With the benefit of hindsight, it must indeed be seen as a gross underestimate of the powers of government necessary in a large and complex society. In a letter to Judge Johnson, written in 1823, nearing the end of his life, Jefferson recalled that it was the belief of himself and his political allies

that man was a rational animal endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and that he could be restrained from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers confided to persons of his own choice and held to their duties by dependence on his own will. We believed that men, enjoying in ease and security the full fruits of their own industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and order, habituated to think for themselves, and to follow reason as their guide, would be more easily and safely governed, than minds nourished in error and vitiated and debased, as in Europe, by ignorance, indigence and oppression. (1907: XV, 441; my emphases)

The long-term influence of this view of a universal ‘human nature’ may perhaps be seen in such spectacular mistakes as the American viceroy’s disbandment of the army and much of the administrative structure of Iraq after the occupation of that country in 2003.

With the advantage of hindsight and two subsequent centuries of research and debate among social scientists, Jefferson’s eloquent statement can easily be seen to contain a central contradiction. On the one hand, he rightly speaks of habituation, recognizing that people’s social habitus is shaped by their experience – including the accumulated experience of generations. This line of thought came to be associated with conservative political theorists, notably Jefferson’s older contemporary Edmund Burke (1729–97). On the other hand, the overall impression given by Jefferson’s writings is that a peaceful, ‘civilized’ society is more the outcome of consciously enlightened political institutions than of a long-term, unintended and ‘blind’ process of development. He appears to take for granted an American habitus in which a strong and stable habitual self-constraint stands almost alone in the steering of conduct, requiring little support from the forces of external constraint by other people. Jefferson asserts that all people can be governed, and govern themselves, by reason, and sees rationality as well as rights and the sen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: Civilizing Processes
• 1. ‘American Civilization’
• 2. ‘Fellow Americans’ and Outsiders
• 3. American Manners Under Scrutiny
• 4. American Aristocracies
• 5. The Market Society
• 6. Violence and Aggressiveness
• 7. And Wilderness is Paradise Enow: From Settlements to Independence
• 8. But Westward, Look, the Land is Bright: From Frontier to Empire
• 9. Integration Struggles
• 10. The Curse of the American Dream
• 11. Involvement, Detachment and American Religiosity
• 12. America and Humanity as a Whole
• Notes
• References
• Index