RALEIGH – Walter Russell Mead is a wonderful writer and skilled at creating unique and engaging themes. His 2002 book Special Providence was one of the best reads of the year, advancing the notion that American foreign policy can be understood as the interplay of four traditions: the Hamiltonians, the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians, and the Wilsonians.
For the past several weeks now, I’ve been nibbling on Mead’s new book, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. I found its early chapters another delightful read, full of apt literary illusions and interesting new concepts to ponder. So during a Christmas Eve Eve break in the holiday action, I sat down and finished the book.
Boy am I sorry. Should have put the book aside three-quarters of the way through and preserved a happy memory.
First, the good news. Mead advances a novel and largely persuasive proposition that the successes enjoyed by the English-speaking world over the past 300 years can be traced to Britain’s distinctive experience of the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent struggles between the Stuart monarchy and its Anglican and Puritan rivals. The result was a mixed constitution that divided power and influence among three classes of social institutions representing reason, faith, and tradition. Mead argues that Britain and its English-speaking progeny – the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, plus the elites of other nations – prospered in trade, preserved political stability, and prevailed over tyrannical enemies because they kept the balance between these three legs of the democratic-capitalism stool.
I can’t do justice to Mead’s notion in a brief summation. His use of historical narrative is best experienced, not described. Discussing the rise of England as a powerhouse of global trade, Mead sets the stage at the beginning of the 17th century:
At the time, England’s geographic position seemed far from advantageous. On the cold and half-frozen fringes of European civilization, its ports lay far from the profitable trade routes of the Mediterranean and the South Atlantic route past the Cape of Good Hope. The stormy northern seas off its coasts offered easy transportation only to the wastelands of North America – where no great, fragile, gold-rich empires waiting for the picking, where no fabulous mines lay awaiting exploitation, and where no valuable spice crops wafted their redolent perfumes over friendly harbors and bays.
Appearances can, indeed, be deceiving. Mead discusses how states much further advanced in economic and social development, such as China and the powers of the European continent, were in reality in a far weaker position to promote and prosper from the new international trading system. And then there was Britain’s peculiar religious and political accommodation:
Scripture, tradition, and reason – each had its place and each had its devotees. But all of them went wrong if you pressed them too far . . . One can picture John Bull scratching his head and slowly concluding that one must accept that in society there will be Bible nuts, tradition nuts, and reason nuts – fundamentalists, papists, and radicals. This is not necessarily the end of the world. To some degree they cancel one another out – the fundamentalist zealots will keep the papists down and vice versa, and the religious will keep the radicals in their place – but the competition among sects will also prevent the established church from pressing its advantages too far and from forming too exalted an idea about the proper stature, prestige, and emoluments of the clergy.
Like I said, Mead gives the reader a lot to ponder. It’s a delight, even when you end up concluding that he doesn’t quite make his case. (This happened for me with Special Providence, too, as I didn’t always agree with how Mead distinguished between, say, Hamiltonian and Wilsonian statesmen.)
I fear I must add, however, that God and Gold goes horribly awry in its fifth part, labeled “The Lessons of History.” It sometimes becomes a rant rather than a reasoned argument – which isn’t itself the problem, as I love a good rant now and then, but Read just isn’t very good at it. At one point, he goes on an extended riff about how the insights of Reinhold Niebuhr can save U.S. foreign policy, with a little help from “evangelical and Pentecostal clergy” who are “among the relative handful of trusted voices who can help public opinion at large appreciate the complex issues the country currently faces.” Uh-huh.
Read the first four parts of God and Gold. You’ll come away with a good refresher course on the past three centuries of world history and some challenging ideas to consider. As for the ending, since it appears to have been hashed out, quite literally, at George Soros’ dinner table, you should be warned that it makes about as much sense as can be expected, namely none.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.