What's So Great About America (12 page)

I intend to answer this question, but first I want to mention a darker side of New York and America that has not escaped the
attention of their critics. To the Islamic fundamentalist, the most striking aspect about New York is not its wealth or its diversity but its debauchery. From the point of view of many Muslims, and of some American conservatives too, New York City is Sin City. There debauchery not only seems prevalent, but even worse, it seems socially accepted.

This raises Sayyid Qutb's argument that America may be a peaceful and a prosperous society but it is fundamentally an immoral society. Qutb would not be impressed by New York's great productivity or its varied cuisine or the fact that people of different backgrounds get along together. He would dismiss all that as worthless triviality. He makes his argument on the highest level. In the good society, he contends, it is God, and not man, who rules. God is the source of all authority, including legitimate political authority. Virtue, not freedom, is the highest value. Therefore God's commands, not man's laws, should govern the society. The goal of the regime is to make people better, not to make them better off.

Qutb's theocratic argument falls harshly on American ears, but let us recall that it is substantially the argument made by Plato and the classical philosophers, who argued that the best regime is devoted to inculcating virtue. Plato's argument is that the ideal arrangement for a society is to have the wise people as rulers. No one can be against this, especially in view of the alternative, which is rule of the stupid or unwise. In Plato's view, the wisest people are necessarily a small minority; in particular, they are the philosophers. Plato's argument against democracy is that it mistakes quantity for quality: it prefers the choices of the uninformed multitude to those who really know
what they are doing. In Plato's view, democracy is the rule of unwise people by unwise people.

In theory, we have to concede that Plato and Qutb are right. Every society should seek to be ruled by its best people, and, to take the point further, who would make a better and more just ruler than an omniscient God? Moreover, it would be silly to insist that God issue a set of laws or rules; better to let Him use divine discretion and decide each case on its merits. Nor is there any question of God submitting to election or popular referendum: why should divine wisdom, which is infallible, be subject to the consent of the unwise?

But let us not be hasty in trying to implement these schemes. Even as we concede, in principle, the validity of the doctrine articulated in Plato's
Republic,
it cannot escape our notice that he has not given us a portrait of an actual city. Rather, his is a “city in speech,” a utopia; even Plato does not expect to see it realized. There are, of course, Islamic theocracies. The Taliban had one in Afghanistan, and several other Muslim countries, notably Iran, operate on the premise that they are being ruled by Allah's decrees. But far from being replicas of paradise on earth, these places seem to be characterized by widespread misery, discontent, tyranny, and inequality. Is God, then, such an incompetent ruler?

In reality, Iran is not ruled by God; it is ruled by politicians and mullahs who claim to act on God's behalf. Right away we see the two problems with Qutb's doctrine. First, Allah's teaching must be divined or interpreted by man, and this raises the question of whether the revelation is authentic and the interpretation accurate. Second, people inevitably disagree over what Allah is saying, or about how his edict applies in a given situation, so
inevitably there must be some human means of adjudicating the conflict. In some cases people may even reject Allah himself, preferring the wisdom of the Christian God or that of their own minds. What is to be done with them?

Islam has solutions to these problems, and they are stern ones. Through an elaborate system of Koranic law, precedent, and tradition, Islamic societies seek to apply divine wisdom to a multitude of situations. Since no law, however detailed, can anticipate every human circumstance, in practice this approach places divine authority at the discretion of mullahs and other authorities, who can use it to have people fined, jailed, flogged, dismembered, or killed. Such sentences are quite common in Islamic societies. As for dissenters and nonbelievers, Islamic societies have traditionally dealt with them with predictable severity. Islamic rulers required Christians and Jews to pay a special tax and to agree to a whole set of religious and social restrictions (no proselytizing, no bearing arms, restrictions on intermarriage, bans on taking certain government posts, no testifying against a Muslim in court, and so on) that effectively made them second-class citizens. As for atheists, polytheists, and apostates, Islamic rulers gave them a simple choice: accept Allah or be killed.
⁹

Before we wax too indignant about Islam's intolerance, let us remember that Christianity traditionally was even more intolerant. Medieval Christians generally had no compunction about expelling Jews, burning heretics, and obtaining confessions with the sword. Muslim rulers may have forced Christians and Jews to be second-class citizens, but some Christian rulers refused to permit Muslims and Jews to be citizens at all. And when Christianity split into Catholic and Protestant, the two camps set upon
each other with a sanguinary vengeance. The American founders were all too familiar with the history of the religious wars, which wreaked havoc and destruction in Europe, and they were determined to avoid that bloodshed here.

T
he founders who confronted the problem of religion were themselves religious men—not orthodox Christians, but Deists—who would have agreed with Qutb that political legitimacy derives from God. I realize that this view runs counter to what many Americans are taught: that America's system of government emerged in resistance to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Yet the Declaration of Independence clearly states that the source of our rights is “our Creator.” It is because our rights come from God, and not from ourselves, that they are “unalienable.” Thus we see that America, too, was founded on divine right: the only difference is that sovereignty is transferred from the one (the king) to the many (the people).

Despite the religious foundation for the American system of government, the founders were determined not to permit theological differences to become the basis for political conflict. The solution they came up with was as simple as it was unique: separation of religion and government. This is not the same thing as religious tolerance. Think about what tolerance means. If I
tolerate
you, that implies I believe you are
wrong,
I
object
to your views, but I will
put up
with you. (If I found your views congenial, there would be no question of tolerance.) In line with this thinking, England had enacted a series of acts of religious
toleration. But England also had an official church. The American system went beyond toleration in refusing to establish a national church and in recognizing that all citizens were free to practice their religion.

One reason that separation of religion and government worked is that from the beginning the United States was made up of numerous, mostly Protestant, sects. The Puritans dominated in Massachusetts, the Anglicans in Virginia, the Catholics were concentrated in Maryland, and so on. No group was strong enough to subdue all the others, and so it was in every group's interest to “live and let live.” The ingenuity of the American solution is evident in Voltaire's remark that where there is one religion, you have tyranny; where there are two, you have religious war; but where there are many, you have freedom.
¹⁰

A second reason the American founders were able to avoid religious oppression and conflict is that they found a way to channel people's energies away from theological quarrels and into commercial activity. The American system is founded on property rights and trade, and
The Federalist
tells us that the protection of the unequal faculties of obtaining property is “the first object of government.”
¹¹
The logic of this position is best expressed by Samuel Johnson's remark, “There are few ways in which a man is so innocently occupied than in getting money.”
¹²
The founders reasoned that people who are working assiduously to better their condition, people who are planning to make an addition to their kitchen, and who are saving up for a vacation, are not likely to go around spearing their neighbors.

Capitalism gives America a this-worldly focus, in which death and the afterlife recede from everyday view. (This is why
funerals are an uncommon and distressing sight in America.) The gaze of the people is shifted from heavenly aspirations to earthly progress. This “lowering of the sights” convinces many critics that American capitalism is a base, degraded system and the energies that drive it are crass and immoral. These modern critiques draw on some very old prejudices. In the ancient world, labor was generally despised and in some cases even ambition was seen as reprehensible. Think about the lines from
Julius Caesar,
“The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious.” And here you might expect Mark Antony to say, “And what's wrong with that?” But he goes on, “If it were so, it was a grievous fault.”
¹³

In all the cultures of antiquity, Western as well as non-Western, the merchant and the trader were viewed as lowlife scum. The Greeks looked down on their merchants, and the Spartans tried to stamp out the profession altogether. “The gentleman understands what is noble,” Confucius writes in his
Analects.
“The small man understands what is profitable.”
¹⁴
In the Indian caste system the
vaisya
or trader occupies nearly the lowest rung of the ladder—one step up from the despised untouchable. The Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun suggests that even gain by conquest is preferable to gain by trade, because conquest embodies the virtues of courage and manliness.
¹⁵
In these traditions, the honorable life is devoted to philosophy or the priesthood or military valor. “Making a living” was considered a necessary, but undignified, pursuit. As Ibn Khaldun would have it, far better to rout your adversary, kill the men, enslave the women and children, and make off with a bunch of loot than to improve your lot by buying and selling stuff.

Drawing on the inspiration of modern philosophers like Locke and Adam Smith, the American founders altered this moral hierarchy. They argued that trade based on consent and mutual gain was preferable to plunder. The founders established a regime in which the self-interest of entrepreneurs and workers would be directed toward serving the wants and needs of others. In this view, the ordinary life, devoted to production, serving the customer, and supporting a family, is a noble and dignified endeavor. Hard work, once considered a curse, now becomes socially acceptable, even honorable. Commerce, formerly a degraded thing, now becomes a virtue.

Of course the founders recognized that both in the private and the public sphere, greedy and ambitious people might pose a danger to the well-being of others. Instead of trying to outlaw these passions, the founders attempted a different approach. As the fifty-first book of
The Federalist
puts it, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The argument is that in a free society “the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”
¹⁶
The framers of the Constitution reasoned that by setting interests against each other, by making them compete, no single one could become strong enough to imperil the welfare of the whole.

In the public sphere the founders took special care to devise a system that would prevent, or at least minimize, the abuse of power. To this end they established limited government, in order that the power of the state would remain confined. They divided authority between the national and state governments. Within the national framework, they provided for separation of powers,
so that the legislature, executive, and judiciary would each have its own domain of power. They insisted upon checks and balances, to enhance accountability.

In general the founders adopted a “policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives.”
¹⁷
This is not to say that the founders ignored the importance of virtue. But they knew that virtue is not always in abundant supply. The Greek philosophers held that virtue was the same thing as knowledge—that people do bad things because they are ignorant—but the American founders did not agree. Their view was closer to that of St. Paul: “The good that I would, I do not. The evil that I would not, that I do.”
¹⁸
According to Christianity, the problem of the bad person is that his will is corrupted, and this is a fault endemic to human nature. The American founders knew they could not transform human nature, so they devised a system that would thwart the schemes of the wicked and channel the energies of flawed persons toward the public good.