Providential
Enlightenment
Christopher Britt
I
With the demolition of the Berlin
Wall in 1989 and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the
nihilistic logic of mutually assured destruction that had dominated the Cold
War rapidly gave way to more hopeful views of the future. In the West generally, but particularly in the
United States of America, such optimism was cast in a triumphant light. Francis Fukuyama gave this victorious vision
its definitive form when, in 1992, he interpreted the end of the Cold War as
the end of History itself. As he
visualized it, in this “post-historical” era there would not be too much for us
“last men” to do, except attend to the administration of global empire and
enjoy the resulting prosperity and ever-lasting peace.[1]
We are enjoying this peace today: a global
war on terror that has no end in sight; an ever-expanding global market economy
whose frenetic use of energy is fast pushing the world to the brink of
ecological collapse; and everywhere the signs of social and political
disintegration associated with a so-called state of exception that has now
become the new norm in governance, not just among despotic regimes, but also,
and more importantly, among democracies the world over.[2] Actually, as a result of this continuing
global violence, there are now more refugees, asylum seekers, and internally
displaced people in the world than at any time since the end of the Second
World War.[3] We are not living in a post-historical era of
perpetual peace, but in an age of mounting global war and destruction.
II
Critical analysis of America’s legacy of
enlightenment reveals that the Enlightenment in America has always and already
contained the seeds, not only of the republican virtues that have sustained
American democracy over the centuries, but also of the imperial vices that have
persistently and repeatedly weakened that democracy. Not unlike the modern democratic virtues it
undercuts, this imperial vice is British in origin. It finds its first philosophical formulation
in Francis Bacon’s identification of inductive reasoning as a new organ or
method for thought, which alone would liberate men from ignorance and reveal to
them the laws by means of which they could rise above and govern nature. In John Locke’s political theory,
enlightenment is also identified with self-mastery: a mastery of the self that
extends, by reason of industry and labor, over the “virgin lands” and
“uncivilized people” such labor allegedly improves. Enlightenment, according to these original formulations,
is a liberating mastery that frees enlightened men from ignorance while enabling
them to dominate both nature and men.
Significantly, for both Bacon and Locke, this enlightened imperium was also a matter of providence
and of the Biblical injunction to improve nature.
When, in 1776, the British colonists in
North America declared their independence from the British monarchy, they
believed that their society was the truest embodiment of this providential
notion of enlightenment. And when, in
1789, the Founding Fathers ratified the Constitution
of the United States of America,
they envisioned the United States as a mythical “City on the Hill” and a beacon
of light in the vast darkness of natural history. In 1803, when Thomas Jefferson signed the
Louisiana Purchase, he did so believing that his country would thereby realize
its purpose as an “empire of liberty” destined to spread the emancipating light
of reason across the entire globe. From
Franklin to Jefferson and from Washington to Hamilton, the Founding Fathers
embraced the providentialist logic implicit in the imperialist notion that
enlightenment is a liberating state of mastery.
In 1823, John Quincy Adams, who firmly believed that the United States had
been designated by God as the redeemer nation, declared, by means of the Monroe
Doctrine, that America’s empire of liberty naturally included all of the
Americas.[4]
Throughout the rest of the nineteenth
century, the conviction that America had a “manifest destiny” to fulfill led
the government of the United States to annex ever-greater expanses of land,
whether by means of purchase (as was the case with Oregon and Alaska) or by
outright conquest (as was the case with Florida, northern Mexico, Puerto Rico,
Hawaii, and the Philippines). While these
conquests surely expressed America’s enlightened legacy of empire, they
nevertheless called into question America’s commitment to the enlightened
republican and democratic ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, by 1900, the majority of
Americans had become so enamored of the idea that America had been chosen by
Providence to civilize the world for Christianity, for democracy, and for
capitalism that, in the Presidential election of that year, they openly voted
against the republic in favor of empire.[5]
At the start of the twentieth century Presidents
McKinley and Roosevelt committed America to a foreign policy that would advance
American global imperial expansion at the expense of democracy both at home and
abroad. The pretense, however, was that
U.S. imperialism in the twentieth century favored democratic self-determination. This idea was closely tied to the notion that
American imperialism was historically unique: it was an anti-imperial
imperialism, which sought to spread everywhere the so-called blessings of
American civilization. In the years leading up to World War II, Henry Luce
summed up this idea when he urged Americans: “to seek and to bring forth a
vision of America as a world power … as the Good Samaritan … as the powerhouse
of the ideals of Freedom and Justice” and to fashion a vision of the Twentieth
Century as “the first great American Century.”[6] Conceived
in this progressive manner, the American Century would introduce to the world a
new kind of anti-imperial imperialism, a new kind of American imperialism that
would allegedly use its power only in order to serve and advance the interests
of humanity. We need only recall the
horrors of U.S. weapons sales and the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to
understand the profoundly nihilistic and destructive nature of the so-called
human interests that this would-be enlightened imperialism advances and serves.
III
Today, more than one hundred years after
the presidential election of 1900, we are living through the consequences of
that fateful betrayal of democracy in favor of empire. Indeed, America’s legacy of enlightenment has
become so thoroughly confused with the providentialist view of America’s
imperial manifest destiny that it is almost impossible to tell the two apart. Consider, for instance, how in response to
the terrorist attacks of 9/11 the U.S. government created an
intelligence-gathering program intended to achieve “total information
awareness.”[7] Housed in the Information Awareness Office of
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, this program
essentially involved the development and implementation of a surveillance
apparatus capable of policing the electronic communications of the entire world. The idea was to ensure that terrorists would
never again surprise the United States. Conspicuously,
this program developed a logo for itself that purposely confused America’s
providential destiny as a world empire with the revolutionary rhetoric of the
Enlightenment. DARPA’s logo usurped the
meaning behind one of the Enlightenment’s central metaphors --that the light of
reason frees us from ignorance-- and turned its emancipating logic on its
head. Rather than represent freedom from
ignorance, fear, and arbitrary external controls, the radiant light of
enlightenment was here made to represent the freedom to control totally and on
a global scale.
The eye of providence, which figures so
prominently in this logo, is of course also a key component of the Seal of the
United States. But in the Seal, this
all-seeing eye is not related to the imperialist ideal of total global
domination. It rather expresses the enlightened
assertion that when men exercise their reasoning power, they become capable of
comprehending the order of the universe and of governing themselves according
to the laws of nature. Thus, the harmonious unity symbolized by the Seal of the
United States is altogether different from the one depicted in the DARPA
logo. It is not the providential unity
of technology, capitalism, and imperialism, but rather the ethical unity of
mind, community, and the cosmos: a unity to which Emerson would give a
transcendentalist expression in his philosophical essays on nature.
This ideal of a rational, harmonious, and
cosmic unity has taken on a devastating irony.
In place of universal reason, we now have the epistemological divisions
of expert forms of knowledge and the moral limitations of the bureaucratic
mind; in place of a rational community of compassionate human solidarity, the
divisions and conflicts of unbridled global capitalism; and in place of a
harmonious relationship to nature, the technological, industrial, and imperial
domination of both nature and mankind. Such
is the crisis of our so-called post-historical age: the enlightening power of
reason, rather than set our minds in proper and harmonious relation to our
communities and to nature, has splintered our minds, fragmented our
communities, and alienated us from nature.
And yet, in spite of all its evident
failures and its destructive nihilism, enlightenment remains for us today the
only viable source of creative power by means of which we may yet aspire to
construct an ethical unity of mind, community, and nature. This is so, not in the sense of a
providential and imperial enlightenment, but rather in terms of the enlightened
secular, democratic, and communitarian ideals proposed by Thomas Paine at the
start of the American Revolution. Of
course, Paine’s opposition to empire, monarchy and religion, his insistence on
popular democracy, universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and free
public education, led most of the other Founding Fathers to regard him as a
dangerous radical, a demagogue, and promoter of an all-too-genuine form of
democracy.[8] Recalling these enlightened democratic ideals
today, we denounce the jingoistic nationalism and providentialist imperialism
that stand in the way of our aspirations for a better future.
[1] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. New
York: The Free Press, 1992.
[2] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005.
[3] UNHCR Global Trends
Report, 2013.
[4] William Earl Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire
Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1992. p.17.
[5]
The Democratic
Party Platform was organized almost entirely around an anti-imperialist stance:
“We declare … that all governments instituted among men derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed; that any government not based upon the
consent of the governed is tyranny; and that to impose upon any people a
government of force is to substitute methods of imperialism for those of a
republic.” The platform goes even
further in its opposition to U.S. imperialism by asserting: “no nation can long
endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that
imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.” To back this final point, the platform
describes U.S. tyranny in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines and concludes
with the specter of militarism, which “means conquest abroad and intimidation
and oppression at home”. “Democratic Party Platform of 1900”, July 4, 1900.
Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
Http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29587.
[6] Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American
Empire, New York, Penguin, 2004, p.65-66.
[7]
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/nsa-and-pentagon-dream-total-information-awareness
[8] Paul Atwood. War and
Empire: The American Way of Life.
New York: Pluto Press, 2010, p.53.
