America's Imperial Crusade in the Philippines

In an essay titled “Expansion and Peace” originally published on December 21, 1899, Theodore Roosevelt offered this defense of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines:

the expansion of a civilized nation has invariably meant the growth of the area in which peace is normal throughout the world.  The same will be true of the Philippines.  If the men who have counseled national degradation, national dishonor, by urging us to leave the Philippines and put the Aguinaldan oligarchy in control of those islands, could have their way, we should merely turn them over to rapine and bloodshed until some stronger, manlier power stepped in to do the task we had shown ourselves fearful of performing.  But, as it is, this country will keep the islands and will establish therein a stable and orderly government, so that one more fair spot of the world’s surface shall have been snatched from the forces of darkness.  Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of peace.

It is worth noting here how Roosevelt uses Enlightenment rhetoric and imagery.  U.S. expansion, he argues, is an enlightening prospect that promises to “snatch” portions of the world’s surface “from the forces of darkness.”  Empire, in this mode, is literally a matter of enlightening.  But in this, as in other representative passages of Roosevelt’s epic prose, he is ultimately less concerned with the enlightenment of those who live in darkness on far away islands than he is with those among his fellow countrymen who, due to either moral depravity or intellectual obtuseness, simply refuse or are incapable of seeing the radiant light of American imperialism.  In the passage at hand, he depicts American anti-imperialists as men who have counseled “national degradation” and “national dishonor”.

In his famous essay of 1899, “The Strenuous Life”, he depicts the anti-imperialists in similarly unflattering terms:

The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills ‘stern men with empires in their brains’ –all these, of course, shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag.  These are the men who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth leading.

With this rhetoric of courageous and strenuous effort, Roosevelt seeks to construct a modern heroic type: the imperial civilizer; but this would-be modern hero actually reverts back to pre-modern forms of heroism celebrated centuries before by Spanish imperial apologists who conceived of their own empire in the Americas as the divinely sanctioned and heroic work of self-sacrificing saints and crusading conquistadors.  By means of such heroic rhetoric, Roosevelt sought, not unlike the Spaniards several centuries before him, to elevate the adventurer and even the criminal to the status of an absolute moral conscience. This totalizing and absolutist conception of the imperial hero is tainted, no doubt, with the universalism of Enlightenment moral and political thought.  But Roosevelt’s heroes of American imperialism are not modern-day Prometheans who dare to steal the light of the gods in order to improve the lot of mankind with their modern science and technological know-how; they are rather pre-modern heroes, bent on imposing the tyrannical spirit of their “strenuous way of life” on those unfortunate enough to come face to face with them in a struggle to retain their own freedom.

The Meek Submission of Potential Criminals

The first time I realized that the state –as in the government of the United States of America—considers each and every one of its citizens a potential criminal was when my wife, who is originally from Colombia, was seeking to change her immigration status and become an American citizen.  As a first step in that process, she had to fill out Form I-485.  This is the form that innocently asks such pieties as: Are you a prostitute?  Are you, or have you ever been, a member of a totalitarian movement?  Have you ever been, or do you intend to become, a terrorist, a torturer?  Have you entered the United States of America with the intent to overthrow the government?  As I mentioned already, my wife is originally from Colombia, which is not exactly a bastion of civic virtue; but all the same, did the state really have to ask her if she ever had been or ever intended to become an out-and-out criminal?  Of course, my wife answered No to all the questions asked on Form I-485.  And of course the state expected her to answer No to all those incriminating questions.  So why the show?  To what end this silly willy-nilly game of cat and mouse?

The answer, at first, eluded me.  After all, I am a native son; a natural citizen who --unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger-- could become President, if I were half the criminal he is.  Yep.  As a native son, I had grown accustomed to thinking of my government as the people’s government, as a republic dedicated to democratic self-governance and to the equality of all before the law.  So I had a hard time figuring out why the state was asking my wife such dastardly questions.  Then it dawned on me that the reason the state asked her these incriminating questions, knowing full well that she would answer No to them all, was that, if in fact she was lying when she answered No, they could legally criminalize her.

Legally criminalize: this is what the state does with each and every person who seeks to become a naturalized citizen of the United States.  Legally criminalized: this is the state in which all natural citizens have always and already existed vis-à-vis the state.  The state legally criminalizes us all, whether naturalized or natural citizens, whether explicitly or implicitly, as potential criminals.

This is not as bad a deal as it sounds.  Far be it from me to be an alarmist.  Consider, for instance, that there are those among us who are criminals.  Whitey Bulger, the nefarious Irish mob boss of Boston (and no, I am not talking about the Boston Police Department), was convicted this past Monday for committing a series of 11 murders and other gang-related crimes.  If the state did not consider him a potential criminal, if there were no code of law in place that anticipated his potential crimes and set forth appropriate punishments, Whitey would still be living it up with his girlfriend on the beaches of southern California.  As Americans, as a people dedicated to an ongoing experiment in democratic self-government, we submit ourselves, our lives, to the rule of law.  We agree that there should be fundamental limits placed on our right to exercise freedom and pursue happiness: that limit is the right of every other American to exercise their own freedom and pursue their own happiness. So in essence, we are all also in agreement with the basic impulse that informs the rule of law: that is, we all more or less agree to treat each other as potential criminals.  Don’t tread on me and I won’t tread on you: this is the basic underlying logic of our experiment in self-governance.

But not all criminals are of the Whitey Bulger sort, and not all crimes tread on other people’s liberty.  Two cases, which are deserving of our on-going attention and concern, are those involving Misters Manning and Snowden.  Both of these young men are accused of crimes against the state.  They are not criminals of the Whitey Bulger sort, but an altogether different breed of would-be criminal.  They are public servants who the government accuses of being disloyal to the state.  In the case of Manning, the accusation stems from the fact that he disclosed a trove of not-too-secret U.S. government files and made them available, through wikileaks, to a global reading public interested in America’s failing human rights record.  In the case of Snowden, because he released into the hands of the United States’s Cold War enemies –notably China and Russia—secret documents detailing the NSA’s global and domestic surveillance procedures.

Both of these young men claim to have released these secret documents out of their love for the American way of life.  Each claims, in his own way, to be a whistle blower whose main motivation has been to unmask the state’s overbearing abuse of human and political rights both abroad and at home. The government views their actions as proof of their potential criminality.  In Manning’s case, he has in fact already been found guilty of crimes, for which he is likely to spend the remainder of his life, locked up in federal prison.  In Snowden’s case, the judge and jury are still out, since he is quite literally still out of the country.

But the issue here, the real issue, is not whether or not or to what extent their actions constitute crimes against the state.  To the contrary, what is at issue is that their actions and the state’s response to these actions reveal that it is the state itself that we must now also regard as a potential criminal.  Its crime is the crime that, according to our own Declaration of Independence, would justify our rising up against it in protest.  It is a common enough crime, committed over the centuries by any number of rulers drunk on the hubris of their power.  We call it tyranny.  The real surprise in all this is therefore not that our government considers us all potential criminals, but that in the face of our own government’s growing tyranny, we choose the option, not of freedom-loving republicans dedicated to democracy, but that of voluntary servants the world over: that option has a name: meek subservience.

John Locke and America's Empire for Liberty

The political theory of John Locke is generally credited with having provided both a philosophical justification for the American Revolution and a practical roadmap for the founding of the Republic.  It is in this sense, for instance, that historians often point to that celebrated phrase in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson, citing Locke, declares the People's right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".  On this view, the influence of Locke on American political culture was decisive, unproblematic, and "happy".  But such a celebratory view of Locke's influence on American political culture correlates less with historical truth than it does with the poetic half-truths of a national myth. This myth tells us that Locke was a champion of liberty, of civil rights, and equality.  The historical truth, while not completely debunking this myth, nevertheless unsettles the truths contained in it.

Locke was a champion of liberty; but he was also a champion of British imperialism.  He defended the right of individuals to enjoy negative liberty --that is, their right to be free from coercion and tyranny, but he also defended the positive liberty of "industrious" people i.e., the British, to conquer foreign lands: both those lands that were inhabited only by barbarians (which for Locke amounted more or less to the entirety of North America, where he had a claim to a significant tract of land in the Carolinas), or those lands that had been conquered by people who were not industrious and had therefore neglected to improve the land with their labor, (which for Locke essentially summed up vast areas of the Spanish colonies in the Americas).  This tension between negative and positive liberties, between autonomy and sovereignty, is the true inheritance that Locke bequeathed to America's Founding Fathers.  It is a tension or ambiguity that combines republican rights with imperial virtue.

Insofar as he was an enlightened thinker, Locke was not the first to formulate this ambiguity.  Some sixty years prior to the publication of Locke's Two Treatises on Government, Francis Bacon had already defined enlightenment as a combination of potentia and productio.  Locke, however, takes this double aspect of enlightenment thought and applies it, not merely to Man's dominance over Nature, but also to Man's ownership of the land.

For Jefferson, who dreamed of U.S. expansion in terms of an Empire of Liberty, the issue was not so much the right to property as the right to pursue happiness, which he conceived in the terms of an agrarian utopia of ever-expansive liberty.  Locke did not, however, mince his words after such a fashion.  For him, government was meant to secure the rights of individuals to life, liberty, and property.

Locke's theory of property combines negative freedom and positive freedom.  Negative freedom is at work in what he calls the Law of Nature.  In the Second Treatise, he writes: "The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: And Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind ... that being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions."  For its part, Positive Freedom is at work in what Locke refers to as a Biblical injunction to improve the land through labor.  In this sense, Locke writes elsewhere in the Second Treatise: "God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labor and the penury of his condition required it of him.  God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of Life."  Accordingly, Locke argues, God gave the land "to the use of the Industrious and Rational (And Labour was to be his Title to it;) not to the Fancy or Contentiousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious".  Locke's theory of property thus combines negative liberty, which protects individuals from invasion of their land, with the positive liberty to invade lands that have not been improved by the labor of others.

Now what is truly worthy of note about this theory is the extent to which it is intimately bound up with justifications for British incursions into the Spanish colonies in the Americas.  In this sense, Locke writes in his Second Treatise: "Nay, the extent of Ground is of little value, without labour, that I have heard it affirmed, that in Spain it self, a Man may be permitted to plough, sow, and reap, without being disturbed, upon Land he has no other Title to, but only his making use of it.  But, on the contrary, the Inhabitants think themselves beholden to him, who, by his Industry on neglected, and consequently waste Land, has increased the stock of Corn, which they wanted."  Here Locke speaks with philosophical admiration of the manner in which Spaniards in his time would recognize labor as the only title necessary to own common lands that would otherwise be left alone in a state of "wastelands". But Locke was not only an enlightened philosopher.  He was also a Landgrave of Carolina and the Secretary of the Council for Foreign Plantations appointed by King Charles II of England.  In this capacity, he ordered a study of the history of the Royal Society, in which the argument on wastelands is turned against Spain's colonies in the Americas.  In this work commissioned by Locke, we read: "how unfit the Spanish humor is, to improve Manufactures, in a Country so distant as the West-Indies; we may learn by their practice in Spain itself: where they commonly disdain to exercise any Manual Crafts, and permit the profit of them, to be carry'd away by strangers" (Quoted in Eva Botella-Rodinas' "Debating Empires, Inventing Empires: British Territorial Claims Against the Spaniards in America, 1670-1714" in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2010).

Locke and his contemporaries in England viewed the Spanish as "lazy" and "sinful", their empire already in decline and doomed inevitably to collapse.  The colonies in the Americas were, on this view, wastelands --lands that the Spanish, who were according to this logic interested only in silver and gold, had neglected to improve.  This prejudice, which in Locke is only in its nascent form, will with the passing of the centuries guide not only British imperial pursuits in the Americas but eventually also those of the United States of America: a Republic which expanded across the continent first and then across the globe in order, supposedly, to civilize the world and turn it, as Jefferson fondly dreamed, into an Empire for Liberty.

The Destruction of Enlightenment

Ours is an Age of Destruction.  The myriad crises that we face today --from global warming to global warring-- are a brutal but eloquent testimony to this destruction.  How are we to make sense of these forces of destruction and combat the nihilism, the intellectual apathy, and lack of creativity that drive them?

The trend in the humanities over the last several decades has been to identify these forces of destruction with the Enlightenment.  Enlightenment Reason, we are told, is not universal but Euro-centric; it is not a liberating force, but a dehumanizing, humiliating, and dominant force that is intimately tied up with colonialism, imperialism, and even fascism.  This post-modern critique of the Enlightenment points to internal flaws in Enlightenment thought, to its underlying contradictions and weaknesses.  Post-modern critics have reduced the Enlightenment --which was a transformative movement that helped modernize science, technology, politics, economics, and society-- to nothing more than a so-called “grand narrative” or “discourse” by means of which Enlightenment thinkers sought, not to liberate themselves and others from tyranny, ignorance, and superstition, but to place humanity under the tutelage of instrumental reason.

Although such post-modern critiques of Enlightenment point correctly to dogmatic features in Enlightenment thought, their caricature of this intellectual and political movement as strictly rationalist and the call that they make for a radical break with the universal moral and political values of Enlightenment, ignores the extent to which Enlightenment thought has failed to live up to its promise in large part because it has always and everywhere been opposed by very powerful enemies.  Think, for example, of the absolutist Spanish monarchy and of the Inquisition; or, if you prefer, of the Salem witch hunts, or for that matter, of aspiring politicians who claim that evolution is but a theory and that global warming is but a delusion.

The Enlightenment, for all its internal contradictions and historical failures, still provides a needed model for projects of cultural theory and social reconstruction in the Americas and the world.  Indeed, what post-modern critiques of the Enlightenment express, first and foremost, is the enlightened hope for a way to re-conceptualize progressive thought and practice.  But because post-modernists throw the Enlightenment’s baby of universal human values out with the proverbial bath water of modernity, the would-be progressive programs of thought and practice that they espouse are mired in the skeptical relativism and historical nihilism that characterize post-modern perspectivism.

What is needed to ward off this nihilism is an alternative view of the Enlightenment and the ambiguity of its legacy in our own age of destruction.  At its conception, the Enlightenment, with its new science based on inductive reasoning, promised to liberate men from superstition and ignorance and reveal to them the mysterious laws that govern nature.  Today, it is fair to say, the Enlightenment has failed to deliver on this liberating promise.  But this is because the Reason that was to set men free and help them understand nature has been reduced to its instrumental dimension: the scientific search for truth is no longer an end in and of itself, but a means to an end.  And what is that end?  Nothing short of the domination of nature by man and the creation of an all-too-human world that lords its technological power over the organic forces of nature.  The Enlightenment also promised to set men free politically.  When the colonists in New England fought against the tyranny of the English monarch, they justified their revolution for independence by appealing to Enlightenment ideals of democratic sovereignty and self-rule.  Today, many peoples around the world see the US as a bully and a tyrant.  Indeed, it would seem that as a people we Americans have regressed from our progressive political virtues of democratic self-government back toward more primitive forms of authoritarian rule.  In the name of freedom, we now torture our enemies or assassinate them with unmanned drones, while at home our age-old right to habeas corpus has been suspended by the bureaucrats in the world’s single largest bureaucracy: the Department of Homeland Security.

The technological elimination of Enlightenment’s liberating power and the accompanying regression toward primitive forms of political power are the two most salient features of our age of destruction.  Humanists would do well to keep this in mind when they venture their post-modern theories on modernity and its discontents.   

A Modern Translatio imperii

A Modern Translatio imperii

The idea that the executive branch of the U.S. government should have a legitimate power to wage an imperial war of conquest and colonization, and to do so with only a modicum of congressional approval and oversight, was first tested at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the U.S., taking full advantage of Spain’s definitive collapse as an empire, conquered and colonized Spain’s erstwhile colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  What occurred on a grand scale at this juncture was a translatio imperii or imperial transfer of power from Spain to the United States of America.  But if the medieval concept of the translatio imperii construed such transfers of power from one emperor or empire to the next as a linear continuum that was destined, according to the prophecies of Daniel, to reach the end of times, in the modern era this apocalyptic vision of imperial decline is turned back on itself.  Rather than a continuum of successive transfers of power destined for eventual collapse, the modern understanding of the translatio imperii is optimistic; it sees this transfer of power as a modernizing and enlightening advance.

According to the positivistic logic of this modern view, American imperialism is superior in kind and quality to Spanish imperialism because the American brand of imperialism, as conceived originally by the nation’s Founding Fathers, seeks to spread liberty and Enlightenment, while the tyranny inherent to the Spanish brand of imperialism only served as an impediment to Enlightenment.  It was in such cheerful terms that American imperialists of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would defend the expansion of U.S. dominion over Spain’s ex-colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  America, they claimed, was a liberating and civilizing empire.  There is, of course, a much less flattering interpretation of this imperial transition of power from Spain to the United States of America.  According to the anti-imperialists, this transition rather marked a regression of the American republic toward the unenlightened and tyrannical forms of a pre-modern Spanish imperium.  Instead of a modernizing advancement destined to spread enlightenment around the globe, anti-imperialists viewed U.S. imperial expansion as evidence of the republic’s decline into a sinister state of political and cultural decadence.

Considered in this darker light, the U.S. conquest and colonization of the Philippines was just as savage and cruel as Spain’s conquests in the Americas at the start of the sixteenth century.  But the similarities between U.S. and Spanish imperialism that this anti-imperialist perspective identifies were not limited to cruelty alone.  The connection, as both the apologists for U.S. imperial expansion and their critics made clear, ran much deeper.  U.S. imperialism was a continuation of Spanish imperialism in that, like the Spanish before them, U.S. imperialists, such as Josiah Strong, imagined and justified U.S. imperial expansion as an evangelical crusade; and much as the Spanish conquistadores had done, imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt glorified as heroic, acts of conquest and colonization that would have been more accurately depicted as acts of brutality.  By defending American imperialism in these terms, American imperialists in effect eliminated the liberating dimension of Enlightenment from their would-be civilizing mission and they essentially reverted to primitive forms of authority.  American anti-imperialists like Mark Twain and William James did not sit idly by; they rather attacked the imperialists and their ideas in open and public debate.  At issue in this debate was America’s legacy of Enlightenment: the legacy, that is, that ambiguously combines republican with imperial virtues.