America the Tarnished

Ronald Wright condemns the short history of Yankee progress in his latest, What is America?

It must be tough being Ronald Wright. As a blisteringly insightful historian with eyes as much on the future as the past, it’s easy to imagine how painful it must be to live here in the early 21st century and watch as the United States leaves a trail of blood across the globe. Some would go into politics or activism to try and stop it; if you’re an award-winning author and former Massey Lecturer like Wright, however, odds are good you’d focus all that outrage into a book instead—which is exactly what the author of A Short History of Progress and A Scientific Romance has done with his latest must-read, What is America? A Short History of the New World Order. But I’ll warn you now: it’s scary.

How scary? Check this out: “The Columbian Age was built on colonial attitudes: on taming the wilderness, civilizing the savage, and the American dream of endless plenty. Now there is nothing left to colonize. Half a millennium of expansion has run out of room. Mankind will either share the Earth or fight over it—a war nobody can win. For civilization to continue, we must civilize ourselves. America, which helped set the Europeans on their new path half a century ago, must now examine its own record—the facts, not the myths—and free itself from the potent yet potentially fatal mix of forces that created its nation, its empire, and the modern world.”

And that’s how the book ends. Like I said, scary.

Wright has been carving out a name for himself among everyday intellectuals since Time Among the Maya first brought him to public attention back in 1990, and What is America? more than lives up to the promise of his other works. An impeccably referenced work (there are 100 pages of notes alone), What is America? is a page-turner in every sense. But even more surprising, given the coincidental timing of the coming U.S. election and his September 11 reading date here in town, it’s not a book he’d been planning for a long time. “It followed off Progress in the sense that I very briefly—only a paragraph or two—alluded to the idea that the European takeover of the Americas, beginning with the Spanish conquests in the 1500s, essentially transformed the world by providing the start-up capital for the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t my own idea,” the Salt Spring-based author explains over a call from Toronto, citing the works of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, “but it’s something we do tend to forget.”

Charting the rise of what he dubs the “Columbian Age”—the period of history beginning with European contact in 1492 and continuing through to the end of the 20th century—Wright doesn’t flinch from describing America as what he feels it has always been: a vicious military power with a puritanical streak and an unrelenting expansionist agenda. “The United States was created in a 300-year war zone that begins fighting the Indians on the Atlantic coast and rolls across the country until the final defeat of the western Indians at the end of the 19th century—a defeat brought about only by repeating weapons, machine guns and the railway,” he explains. “That, I think, is what makes American culture different from the rest of Western civilization: that interior culture forged on the frontier is steeped in militarism, in endless fighting against an adversary that seems like a godless, barbarian enemy by people whose contact with the rest of the west was very tenuous and who, if they read any books at all, only read the Bible. So you’ve got this religious fundamentalism and militarism actually breeding along the frontier as the United States grows . . . that leads to one-half of a very polarized nation, a polarity we now see in absolutely sharp relief with the current presidential campaign.”

Heavy stuff, to be sure, but as with all of Wright’s works, What is America? is eminently readable. But it’s not all sturm und drang; he also pays particular attention to pre-contact indigenous cultures and how they lay the foundation for America’s rise. “I think most people haven’t thought about how important the Americas—North, Central and South—were,” he says. “We tend to think of the Renaissance and the ensuing technological advances being the result of European creativity, and that’s partly true; but if the New World had been uninhabited, or inhabited by people living only at the hunter-gatherer stage, everything would have moved much more slowly. There wouldn’t have been any gold or silver—or even local knowledge of where to mine gold or silver—and there wouldn’t have been any towns or roads or big stocks of food.” He also notes the importance of indigenous agriculture—tomatoes, potatoes, turkey, sweet potato, chocolate and cassava—imported overseas that gave rise to the population booms in Europe and Africa, and led to both the Industrial Revolution and the culture of slavery. “Essentially, a kind of economic and demographic pump starts to work after about 1500, which created the modern world,” he says. “This flowed from history’s big bang in 1492, when two halves of this planet that had been almost completely isolated for many thousands of years were rejoined.”

To get the full impact of Wright’s ideas, you’ll have to read the book, but let’s get back to his final thought of us needing to “civilize ourselves.”

“We’re not civilized,” he says. “The idea that we’re more civilized than people in the Middle Ages went out the window with secret torture chambers in Baghdad . . . we are no better morally than we have been in the past, and we need to recognize that. The idea that moral progress goes with technological progress is nonsense. If we want civilization, we have to become morally civilized or we’ll just destroy ourselves.”

 

Wright on Wrongs: More with Ronald Wright on What is America?

Monday Magazine: How coincidental was the timing of What is America?

Ronald Wright: When I started working on this book, I’d hoped to have it done before the election. The Bush regime is very extreme—it’s certainly the most radical right-wing regime in any Western nation since 1945 and it’s also one of the most extreme regimes ever in the history of the United States—although it belongs in a long history of similar presidencies, beginning with Andrew Jackson in the 1830s and running down through people like Nixon and Reagan. America has never been the peace-loving nation it thinks it is; it’s occasionally been on the side of peace, particularly in the time of Woodrow Wilson trying to create a new world order at the end of the First World War, and Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War. But most of the time, America has been an expanding imperial power—first across its continent and then around the world. Almost before the last Indians were rounded up and put in reservations, it’s already beginning in the Philippines, in Hawaii, in Cuba and in Latin America.

MM: Is this a unique view of American history?

RW: Europeans tend to want to give themselves the credit for all of this; we’ve forgotten how important the Aztec and Incan empires—and the other cultures that proceeded them—were in providing this enormous treasure house that Europeans could ransack, as well as countries ready-made for colonization, because the people had died off and couldn’t defend what they had. We also tend to think the American myth that North America was sort of empty; there may have been a couple of cities in Mexico and Peru, but in North America the Indians were just a few people living in the wood, wandering savages that weren’t using this place. That idea was used to justify dispossessing them, but in fact the vast majority of them were corn farmers living in towns and even cities when the Europeans first arrived; one of the biggest ancient buildings in the world is in the United States, an earthen pyramid with a bigger base on it than the Great Pyramid in Egypt—this was not the work of “wandering savages.”

MM: You draw clear parallels with contemporary American policies and their historical precedents. Does that mean there’s nothing new in, say, the attacks on Iraq?

RW: What is really not unusual is the way in which unscrupulous politicians, usually with a militarist agenda, exploit any kind of terrorist attack or civil disorder or international incident to further their aims and those of a small coterie of war profiteers. That’s been happening for hundreds of years, but it’s just become particularly noticeable under Bush. It’s very worrying that both the First and Second World Wars were set off by the overreaction to terrorist attacks by the powers-that-be . . . . What is the same is the way in which extremist politicians with an extremist agenda, linked to jingoism and nationalism, immediately seized upon these outrages to suspend the civil rights of their citizens and consolidate their power.

MM: You refer to America as the “lone superpower.” What about China?

RW: China seems to be a rising economy and a rising military power, but it’ll be a long time—if ever—before China has a military presence comparable to that of the United States. By some estimates, the United States has a military budget greater than all other countries put together; by other estimates, it’s at least greater than the top 20. It’s impossible to assess these things . . . but no country comes anywhere close to spending what the United States does on its military, so in that sense, the United States is still the lone superpower. But the thing we’re not really noticing is not the rise of the Asian tigers as much as the emergence of a new kind of supernational organism—a collection of states that pool their resources and cooperate, as being pioneered by the European Union. The Europeans have learned from their history; they’ve been trying to kill each other for centuries and, after two horrible world wars, they’ve realized they can’t go on doing that; the Americans, however, are still trapped in the old era of militarism and unilateralism . . . and that’s a very old-fashioned, archaic form of imperialism which has been discredited everywhere else.

MM: The Republican National Convention has been happening while you’ve been promoting this book. How do you feel about what’s been going on down there?

RW: It’s the politics of fear. You have people standing up saying, “We need McCain because he’s the man for these dangerous times” and I’m thinking, “Dangerous times?” The wars the Americans are involved in at the moment are wars that they started; the terrorist attacks, bad though they were, were absolutely nothing compared to the threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Soviet Union and absolutely nothing compared to the threats of the two world wars—and yet civil liberties and standards of civilized behaviours, such as bans on the use of torture, those things survived through two world wars and, to some extent, the Cold War, but they’ve now been thrown out in this ridiculous, so-called war on terror—which is really about using sledgehammers on peanuts, compared to those other three things.

MM: History is seen as examining the past, but your work seems important to the future. Is that intentional?

RW: The patterns of human behaviour are remarkably similar. The particulars of events and cultures and technology change, but the patterns of human behaviour—particularly the tendency to be stampeded by fear or seduced by greed—these are deeply ingrained in human nature and easily exploited by the worst kind of politicians. Unfortunately, our technologies have become so powerful, our levels of consumption are now threatening the entire biosphere of this planet; we just can’t go on living that way, we have to recognize how flawed human nature is and escape from that. And the first step is recognizing the pattern, like the guy who recognizes he’s a drinker and can’t have another drink; we have to recognize these terrible flaws in ourselves and somehow escape from their power to outdo us—because they will outdo us on a massive scale.

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Ronald Wright
7:30 pm Thursday, September 11
Alix Goolden Hall, 907 Pandora
Tickets $5 at Munro’s or the door
250-382-2464 • munrobooks.com