Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

The distance between that civilization and the actual cultures of the nations of Europe can easily be measured by the observer of European events during the last seven years. To that civilization belong the ideals, to those cultures, the realities, of the Great War. And all of us who have thought and fought in it have souls which are irremediably divided between that civilization and those cultures. If we should limit ourselves to the consideration of present facts and conditions, we might well give way to despair: not for a good many years in the past have nationalities been so impervious to the voice of the common spirit as they are in Europe to-day. And the sharp contrast between ideals and realities which has been made visible even to the blind by the consequences of the war, has engendered a temper of violence and cynicism even among those rare men and parties who succeeded in keeping their ideals au dessus de la mêlée, and therefore did not put them to the destructive test of a promise which had to be broken.

The moral problem which every nation of Europe will have to labour at in the immediate future, is that of the relations of its historical culture or cultures with the exigencies of the humana civilitas. It is the problem that presents itself more or less dimly to the most earnest and thoughtful of Europeans, when they speak of the coming “death of our civilization,” or of the “salvaging of civilization.” To many of them, it is still a problem of institutions and technologies: its essentially spiritual quality does not seem to have been thoroughly grasped as yet. But it is also the problem that confronts, less tragically, with less urgency, but not less inevitably, this great European Commonwealth which has created its own life on the North American continent for the space of the last three centuries.

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This European Commonwealth of America owes its origin to a small number of adventurers and pilgrims, who brought the seeds of English culture to the new world. Let us very rapidly attempt a characterization of that original culture.

England holds as peculiar and distinctive a position among the nations of Europe as Italy. She is the meeting-point of the Romanic and Germanic elements in European history; and if her culture may appear as belonging to the family of mediterranean cultures (to what we have called the latina civilitas), to an English Catholic, like Cardinal Newman, there was a time, and not very remote, when the Protestant could be proud of its Teutonic associations. From a Catholic and Franco-Norman mediæval England, logically emerges, by a process similar to that exemplified by Italy and France and Spain, the England of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, of Shakespeare and the Cavaliers: Renaissance England. She flourishes between the suppression of the monasteries and the suppression of the theatres. She moulds, for all centuries to come, the æsthetic and political mind of the English people. But she carries the germs of a widely different culture in her womb: she borrows from them, already during the Elizabethan age, some traits that differentiate her from all other Renaissance cultures. And these germs, slowly gaining impetus through contrast and suppression, ultimately work her overthrow with the short-lived triumph of Cromwell and the Puritans.

After 1688, the law of English life is a compromise between Puritan and Cavalier, between Renaissance and Reformation, which sends the extreme representatives of each type out of the country, builders of an Empire of adventurers and pilgrims—while at home the moderate Cavalier, and the moderate Puritan, the Tory and the Whig, establish a Republic with a King, and a Parliamentary feudal régime. But the successive stages of English culture do not interest us at this point, except in so far as America has always remained closer to England than to any other European nation, and has again and again relived in her own life the social, political, spiritual experiences of the Mother Country.

It is from the two main directions of English spiritual life that America, through a double process of segmentation, Elizabethan or Cavalier in the South, Puritan in the North, draws the origins of her own life. It is in the Cavalier and the Puritan, still within the circle of English life, that the germs of American culture must be sought. The peculiar relations of the Cavalier and the Puritan to the general design of European civilization define the original attitude of this Commonwealth beyond the sea towards the other European cultures, and are the origins of the curves which, modified in their development by the addition of new elements and by the action of a new, distinctive environment, American culture has described and will describe in the future.

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Puritanism is essentially a culture and not a civilization. The Puritan mind, in its quest for an original Christian experience, falls upon the Old Testament and the Ancient Law. The God of the tribes of Israel becomes its God, a God finding a complete expression in the law that rules his chosen people. A compact, immovable spiritual logic, a set of fixed standards, a rhetoric of the virtues, the identification of any element of growth and change with the power of evil, a dualistic morality, and the consequent negation of a spiritually free will, these are the characteristics of Puritanism, constituting at the same time, and with the same elements, a system of truth and a system of conduct. In both the meanings in which we have used the word religion at the beginning of this essay, Puritanism is a perfect, final religion. Transplanted to America when Europe was slowly becoming conscious of the metaphysical implications of the destruction of the old Cosmology—when the discovery of an infinite universe was depriving a purely transcendent divinity of the place it had been given beyond the limits of a finite universe—the infinite universe itself being manifest, in the words of Bruno, as lo specchio della infinita deità,—it gave birth to an intrinsically static culture, standing out against a background of transcendental thought.

The principles of growth in Puritanism were not specifically Puritan: they were those universal values that Puritan discipline succeeded in rediscovering because every moral discipline, however fettered by its premises, will inevitably be led towards them. Quite recently, a sincere and ardent apologist of Puritanism recognized in a document which he considers as the highest expression of that culture in America, a paraphrase of the Roman dulce et decorum. The irrationality which breaks through the most hermetically closed system of logic, in the process of life, asserts itself by extracting from a narrowly institutional religion values which are not dependent upon a particular set of institutions, nor are valid for one people only. But we might detect the germs of that irrationality already in the very beginnings of the system, when Milton adds the whole weight of the Roman tradition to the Puritan conception of democracy—or in the divine words of the Gospels, through which in all times and places every anima naturaliter christiana will hear the cry of Love rebelling against the letter of the Ancient Law.