From the way the editors at The Guardian caption his piece, one might suppose that "not good for the cosmos" is more or less Mr. Ash's estimate of le religionisme en Amérique, but probably that would be only the estimate of his editors. Mr. Ash is a Hoovervillain now, even if only an honourary and exotic sort of one, so he is not permitted to say anything that smacks too much of M. Voltaire and Col. Ingersoll. The flaming walls of the tank-thinkers' world are located somewhere around "Jesus - I found myself inwardly exclaiming, as a post-Christian European - Jesus, what century are we in?" Mr. Ash can get away with more than any native of Wingnut City would be allowed, but that sentence is about as far as even a post-Christian Old Euro can safely go. I doubt that the Thought Police would have passed the sentence itself, did it not bear that explicit warning label that Timothy Garton Ash is not exactly a regular guy, which means that allowances must be made.
I'm not entirely sure I can read the minds of the Thought Police, however. It is possible that they would be influenced by the musty stereotype according to which expensively educated Brits must be eccentrics of one kind or another, with this one specializing in the flagrant dottiness of questioning whether the Homeland of Father Zeus is really "on the cutting edge of societal evolution" -- as Dr. Limbaugh likes to say a bit too often about Dr. Limbaugh. In that case, the audience response required would be "Ain't he cute?" rather than "Almost all of 'em think like that over there." Either way, though, the neocomrades are not to take this performer altogether seriously.
Not surprisingly, there is no sign that Mr. Ash does not take Mr. Ash with perfect solemnity. If he didn't, he would not be playing the same game as his neocomrades Buckley and Will. To set up as Sir Oracle for a joke is fun too, but that is not what we have here. I'm afraid TGA is really trying to be the Alexis de Tocqueville of the tank-thinker epoch, and it takes a bit of work to unearth the funny side of the original M. de T. Should you care to attempt the exercise, read the august masterpiece in conjunction with Mrs. Trollope, who is almost all funny side. At least she is funny now, although a lot of postcolonials in the 1830's were very earnestly annoyed by what she wrote about them. Anyhow, read her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) side by side with the Titan of Right-Wing Intellect, who visited in 1831, and ask yourself which of the two gives you a clearer notion of what General Jackson'a USA was really like.
Mr. Ash's worst fit of detocquevillizing I take to be the paragraph that begins "Saint Anselm's most famous formula was . . . ." Especially the first half of it, since after all there may be something to be said for "seeking to understand what this religiosity actually implies for Democrat or Republican policies in the world." (There is, however, nothing to be said for, or even simply about, "Democrat policies" except that Mr. Ash is a Hoovervillain, which we have noticed already. I doubt the Thought Police would have red-penciled "Democratic policies," especially coming from the keyboard of the exotic Mr. Ash, whose mandatory eccentricity might easily take the form of referring to us donkeys the way we refer to ourselves rather than Dr. Limbaugh's way.)
Since poor St. Anselm does not belong in this performance at all, we need not discuss him any more than Mr. Ash discusses that "deeply reasonable argument" of his, whatever it may consist in. Anselm and argument are only icing on the cake, ornamental rather than functional. The literary fault, the detocquevillizing, is to apply such high-class icing to rather commonplace cake.
It is a different sort of fault that after announcing the grand program of "seeking to understand what this religiosity actually implies" &c., Mr. Ash supplies no follow-through beyond telling us that even the Devil and Bill Clinton can quote Scripture with fluency. Not exactly news, that.
At the end of the day, or rather, the end of the scribble, it is not just difficult to take Mr. Ash as seriously as he'd like to be taken, it is impossible. He does not give us enough to go on. For example, it would be natural to wonder whether he supposes that the religiosity of extremist Republicans is different from the religiosity of Democrats. It's quite true that both can pick out congenial passages from the Vetus and the Novum, but that well known fact does not even begin to address the question. Do they treat their pet passages differently, or don't they? Mr. Ash makes us want to know what he thinks about it, but he declines to tell us. Assuming that there are some differences in the application as well as the selection of prooftexts, which I suppose off-hand a competent sociologist or journalist could probably establish to be the case, what implications do these differences have for the policy of the Big Management Party as opposed to that of us donkeys? Mr. Ash may or may not think he knows, but he certainly is not telling, even though he's the one that raised the question.
Perhaps the editors of the Guardian did not feel slightly swindled after reading the piece as I do. If so, they will have taken Mr. Ash to agree with them that Yank religionism is little more than local colour, a sort of folk-dancing equivalent. Mr. Ash did not say that, and of course the Thought Police would never allow any Hoovervillain, however exotic and quaintly eccentric, to say such a thing. If the "deeply reasonable argument" rigmarole means anything to him -- which there is no way to decide, but also no reason to doubt -- Mr. Ash must in fact regard Yank religionism as being of considerable significance. Unfortunately he refuses to reveal to us exactly what it is significant of. At the Guardian they seem to have decided from Mr. Ash's saying nothing about its significance that he considers it to be of zero significance -- a non sequitur if ever there was one. Nevertheless, Mr. Ash did rather ask to be misread that way. A bottom line like "The candidates' professions of faith merely tell you they are American politicians. Everything else depends on which of God's messengers you get," especially if taken in isolation, might not unreasonably be understood to mean that one can know everything one needs to about American politics without paying any attention to the religionizing. Or if not that, then at least that Yank religionizing is an optional icing on the political cake: everybody (in the USA) would notice at once if it wasn't there, but given that it is present, the exact colour and flavour and texture of it are not worth investigating, because such an investigation would turn up nothing that could not be learned from other sources. Mr. Ash did not say that, and I doubt he believes it.
Actually I am more confident that he does not believe it than that it is not in fact more or less how America works. Even granting that religionistical elephants and religionistical donkeys select different prooftexts, deploy them differently, and deploy them differently towards different goals, it remains entirely possible, for all I can see to the contrary, that the whole prooftext business is a peripheral and redundant sideshow, at least from a strictly political standpoint. It would be interesting to see a sociologist or journalist or perhaps a Church historian actually do the work that Mr. Ash proposes and then shirks, yet after the data have been collected and analyzed and published, perhaps one would read the study through without learning anything new or remarkable about US politics. It does tend to be the case that competent sociology ends up providing firm tertiary-educational and scientistic proof of what everybody knew already. And that's perfectly OK, because if we had a Copernican Revolution in social studies every six weeks, the implication would be that we radically do not understand our own society, a proposition that is improbable as well as repugnant.
Mr. Ash and M. de Tocqueville are not exactly "our society," to be sure, but the proposition that such toney outsiders are likely to understand us better than we understand ourselves has an unpleasantly Copernican air about it, as far as I am concerned. On the other hand, "understand" is an ambiguous word. I should say that all Americans understand what's going on when our pols start laying on the God stuff with a trowel or a dumptruck, but that does not mean that we can all write down a good account of what they are up to. It does mean, maybe, that we don't really need a good written account of it, and in that case we should not feel too swindled when Mr. Timothy Garton Ash fails to deliver the goods he promised. It would have been nice to have them, but we can do without.
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There's one thing the US presidential contenders all have in common: God With 17 months to go, the 2008 race is already well under way, and the first signs are of a resentful, defensive America Timothy Garton Ash in New York Thursday June 7, 2007 The Guardian We all know Christmas begins earlier every year, but imagine if it were to begin in May. And that's May the year before. This is what's happening with the presidential elections in the US. There are another 17 months until the actual vote next November, but the campaign is well under way. On Tuesday, I watched a television debate between 10 Republican contenders, following a similar one between the Democratic hopefuls last Sunday. At this rate, election fatigue will set in before we've even reached election year. Candidates are not merely nailing their colours to the mast; under media interrogation, they are compelled to take up detailed positions that they'll then find difficult to shift. This is not good for US policy. Meanwhile, the inhabitant of the White House is, in an important sense, already ex-president Bush. As a key former vice-presidential aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, goes to jail for perjury, the Bush administration increasingly resembles a badly shot-up, heavily listing aircraft carrier, limping towards port with, still faintly visible on the bridge, the tattered remnants of a sign proclaiming "Mission Accomplished". Even the Republican candidates in Tuesday's debate either damned Bush with faint praise or praised him with faint damns. Or not so faint. Asked by CNN's Wolf Blitzer what use he would make of ex-president Bush if he became president, congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado said Mr Bush would never darken the doorstep of the White House again. Yet for another year-and-a-half, Bush will be the most powerful man in the world, invested with the powers needed to block a G8 initiative on climate change, push through an irrelevant and divisive antiballistic missile shield and order a tactical nuclear strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The one thing he'll find it difficult to do is to put together international coalitions for action based on trust in current US leadership. Apart from anything else, everyone will be looking to his potential successors. This long limbo is not good for the world. The post-2009 US one begins to glimpse in these early pre-presidential debates is a defensive, resentful, slightly truculent place. Although leading Republican candidates such as John McCain will not accept this, the American people have basically decided that the Iraq war is over and the mission has not been accomplished. It's not a matter of when but how the US withdraws militarily, even if that withdrawal is, in the first instance, only to a few fortified camps and a fortress embassy in the green zone in Baghdad while the carnage and ethnic cleansing continues all around. The lesson that most Americans seem to have drawn is that the US should have less of these foreign entanglements in future, and look to its own. Both on trade and on immigration, the atmosphere is increasingly protectionist. The fiercest clashes in the Republican debate were about immigration. Partly this was internal politics. Because leading candidate John McCain is co-sponsor of a bill that could have the effect of legalising some 12 million illegal immigrants, other candidates had a chance to score off him. Rudy Giuliani described the bill as "a typical Washington mess". But there's something deeper going on here as well. The undertones of panic recall nothing so much as Europeans agonising about Muslim immigrants in their midst, despite the fact that the majority of migrants here come from a western cultural background, being mainly Spanish-speaking and Christian. "We are becoming a bilingual nation," said one of the candidates, "and that is not good". A sentiment that would be entirely at home on the French or German right. What remains fundamentally different from the old continent is the way American politicians not merely have religion but wear it on their sleeve. An extreme example is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Answering a question about evolution versus so-called intelligent design, Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister before he became a politician, said simply: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth." He didn't know when or how exactly God did the business, but do it He certainly did. To say you didn't believe that, he added, was in effect to say that you didn't believe in God. Then he quoted Martin Luther: Here I stand, I can do no other. And he earned, from the audience at St Anselm College, a Catholic liberal arts college in Manchester, New Hampshire, a fair round of applause. In answer to a follow-up question, he said: "If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are welcome to do it." Jesus - I found myself inwardly exclaiming, as a post-Christian European - Jesus, what century are we in? Yet other candidates hastened to second him, albeit in more elliptical ways. John McCain praised the eloquence of "Pastor Huckabee" and went on to say he had no doubt God played some part in "the time before time". (Code-phrase for the Christian right. Decoded: this speaker is one of us, you can give him your vote.) Senator Sam Brownback assured us that "there's a God of the universe that loves us very much and had a part in the process". Well, that's all right then. But don't think this religiosity is confined to Republican candidates. In an earlier debate, organised by a left-liberal Evangelical group called Sojourners, the three leading Democrat contenders, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barrack Obama, vied with each other in testifying to the importance of their faith. Edwards did say firmly "I believe in evolution", but he quickly added that "the hand of God today is in every step of what happens with me and every human being that exists on this planet". Asked a painful question about how she coped with Bill's infidelity, Hillary Clinton said she was sustained by "my faith and the support of my extended faith family, people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me". Angela Merkel, who chairs this week's G8 summit, comes from a party described as Christian Democrats and a church called Evangelical, but I don't think you'd ever catch her talking about prayer warriors. Next to the Atlantic ocean, this is perhaps the greatest European-American divide. On reflection, I realise I was wrong about Christmas. Over here, it doesn't merely start in May the previous year. In US politics, every day is Christmas. Saint Anselm's most famous formula was "faith seeking understanding". There is a deeply reasonable argument to be had - and many secular rationalists are conducting it - about the basic claims of this faith. But since religion is not going to disappear from US politics any time soon, there is an equally important exercise which consists of seeking to understand what this religiosity actually implies for Democrat or Republican policies in the world. That is a very different question. Religious American politicians who may seem to secular Europeans to be irrational in one area of their being can be reasonable, rational and liberal in their policies in the world - more so, on occasion, than some secular European leaders. For proof positive, you need look no further than another Clinton, Bill. The candidates' professions of faith merely tell you they are American politicians. Everything else depends on which of God's messengers you get. |
(( Hmm, no Middle East at all, Mr. Bones. Well, we never actually promised, did we? not even implicitly like Timmy. ))
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