In the forward to What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order, Ronald Wright points out that his book arises from the final chapter of an earlier work, A Short History of Progress. There, he planted the seeds of a simple thesis with far reaching consequences. It is his latter book which expands upon these consequences. The thesis is this: the world we know today, dominated by a world view sprung from the heart of Western Europe, would not have been possible if it weren’t for the fact that, on first contact with Europe, the Americas were already inhabited by 100 million people, at least two well-established civilizations, networks of roads, sophisticated agricultural practices and, most significantly, enough capital (in the form of precious metals) to finance the industrial revolution. Conversely, if the myths of the Americas had been true — i.e. the tales of intrepid explorers taming a vast and empty wilderness — so much labour and capital would have been poured into the Americas that industrialization would not have happened or would have been significantly delayed. In short, modern civilization, or what Wright calls the New World Order, rests upon exploitation of both people and the environment. Moreover, the myth, with its runaway-train assumption of continued exploitation, will lead to the collapse of our civilization if we allow this state of affairs to persist.
Part of Wright’s approach is to unseat the myths that feed the American narrative today. For example, every thanksgiving, Americans offer up a quasi-religious liturgy to mark the first Puritan settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth when fresh immigrants from England are supposed to have thanked God for the bounty of the New World. In fact, they should have offered a two-fold thanks, first, to the local inhabitants for sharing resources and, second, to the smallpox virus for clearing out pre-existing dwellings and making land available with little resistance. This is a pattern that persisted for at least three centuries — local assistance answered by European betrayal.
Another myth is the account of the Great Plains Indians, nomadic tribes who lived in a symbiotic relationship with the American Bison. This story has been perpetuated in the popular imagination by Bill Cody’s Wild West Shows, dime store Western’s, Saturday morning movies, and more recently by Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves. In fact, the Plains Indians were displaced peoples squeezed westward by the pressure of white settlement, a continuing process of European betrayal that drove native peoples to the Pacific Ocean and culminated in the acquisition of Hawaii and the annexation of the Philippines. The greatest tool in this displacement wasn’t railways or guns, but debt. The communal lifestyle that characterized the Iroquois Confederacy, with its longhouses and consensus decision-making, had to be forcibly dismantled because it was highly resistant to the economic incursion of settlers from the Eastern seaboard. Wright cites Thomas Jefferson from 1803:
To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare and we want … we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.
This was later bolstered by legislation such as the Dawes Allotment Act (1887) which forbade communal ownership, making it impossible to acquire substantial assets without debt financing. As Senator Dawes observed, the problem with the Indian was that he lacked “selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.”
It becomes clear from the narrative that what we now call neoliberalism is merely a refinement of the colonizing rationales that have been at work in North America for 400 years. Reaganomics and its subsequent iterations during the Bush presidencies are merely a return to an earlier state of affairs which predates the New Deal. However, we suffer from an historical dementia and forget that the New Deal was adopted because we had discovered that an economy organized on an ideology of selfishness destroys itself.
For me, the most disturbing of Wright’s narratives is the tale that runs directly from the first Puritans to the blithering lunacy of Sarah Palin. It disturbs me because, like millions of other WASP North Americans, I can trace my ancestry to the Mayflower. I’d rather not admit it, but culturally, Sarah Palin and I are distant cousins. Nevertheless I’m thankful that prior to the American Revolution, one of my more clear-sighted ancestors joined a wave of United Empire Loyalists who chose to leave the country. Puritanism spawned thousands of wingnut Protestant sects. Says Wright:
The seeds of these sects had been carried westward by the Puritan diaspora. Far from the deep waters of their own civilization, and able to absorb only superficial elements of the native civilization they displace, the frontier folk became cultural castaways. Religion decayed into superstition, liberty into anarchy, education (when there was any) into Bible study and little else. “Complex society,” Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, shrinks “into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control.” This culture, in a perpetual state of insecurity and adolescence, exerted a “founder effect” on those who settled in its wake, especially after crossing the Appalachians — a psychological as well as physical separation from the seaboard.
What Turner documented at the end of the nineteenth century continues to hold true at the beginning of the twenty-first century. An ideology which celebrates selfishness coupled with a religiously justified anti-intellectualism has produced something virulent within American society.
While Wright’s book may arise from the final chapter of A Short History of Progress, it points to consequences which have more in common with an earlier chapter titled “Fools’ Paradise.” It is an account of Easter Island and offers a cautionary tale for Western civilization. At its peak, Easter Island support 10,000 inhabitants on sixty-four square miles. A religious mania arose amongst its people and competing groups built bigger and bigger monuments to their gods. Construction of the monuments depleted their natural resources. To move them from the quarries required timber, resulting in deforestation, soil erosion, poor crops, starvation, depopulation. By the time the first European ships arrived in 1722, its once elaborate social fabric was in tatters. Easter Island is an extinct volcano, and from its chief peak, Teravaka, it is possible to survey the entire island. The inhabitants must have known what they were doing. They could see clearly the limits of their island. They could see clearly when the last tree would be gone. Yet they cut it down anyways.
Will that be America’s story? As it strives to establish a New World Order, will it allow a confluence of religious mania and boundless consumption destroy us all? Wright’s tone shifts as he moves from dispassionate historical examination to the America which straddles the Bush and Obama administrations. There is in his tone a sense of indignation. Perhaps the indignation comes from the fact that he is not American, which means that although his life and lives of nearly seven billion other inhabitants of this tiny island are deeply affected by all that is American, nevertheless he is excluded from its politics. He stands on Teravaka and asks: “Will they cut it all down? Will they really cut it all down?”