Westward Aggression

A friend pointed me to this excerpt from Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation. It was very interesting. In it, Kagan explores the aggression of the earliest American societies and attempts to frame American aggression in terms of a blend of survivalist instincts and religious/philosophical ideals. Kagan seems to subscribe to the idea that the fact that America was founded on the edge of a continent that was separated from "civilization" by months of water inherently shaped America in ways that prevented it from remaining British.

Back in grad school I was first introduced to the idea of America's frontier allowed/forced American society to form in ways fundamentally different than the way society functioned in the old world. It's really fascinated me ever since.

Kagan starts by (I believe, rightly) asserting that the prospect of free land forced the Puritan society to collapse. He's right on when he says, "This colonial America was characterized not by isolationism and utopianism, not by cities upon hills and covenants with God, but by aggressive expansionism, acquisitive materialism, and an overarching ideology of civilization that encouraged and justified both." Then the very next paragraph he details the Indian wars culminating with this statement, "continued expansion seemed to many a matter of survival, a defensive reaction to threats that lay just beyond the ever-expanding perimeter of their English civilization." Once again, I'm on the same page as Kagan.

But then in his "The Expansionist 'Mission'" section he makes an interesting logical move that I don't feel comfortable with. "There were other powerful motives as well, and more exalted justifications. The Anglo-American settlers pressed into territories claimed by others in the conviction that they were serving a higher purpose, that their expansion was the unfolding of an Anglo-Saxon destiny. They saw themselves as the vanguard of an English civilization that was leading humanity into the future."

From where does the justification for this sentiment come? He says the settlers saw their clearing of the wilderness as an "inherently noble task" even though early on in the chapter he rightfully attempted to convince his reader that those who went out into the wilderness were not Christians with higher ideals who attempted to maintain one foot in religion while placing the other foot on unplowed soil. What happened to the Kagan who wrote,

"Their rigid theocracy required control and obedience and self-restraint, but the expansive North American wilderness created freedom, dissent, independence, and the lust for land. The abundance of land and economic opportunities for men and women of all social stations diverted too many minds from godly to worldly pursuits. It undermined patriarchal hierarchy and shattered orthodoxy. Those who did not like the way the doctrines of Calvinism were construed and enforced in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had only to move up the Connecticut Valley. Within a dozen years after Winthrop’s arrival, Puritan divines were decrying their parishioners’ sinful desire for ever more “elbow-room” in their New World. 'Land! Land! hath been the Idol of many in New-England,' cried Increase Mather. 'They that profess themselves Christians, have foresaken Churches, and Ordinances, and all for land and elbow-room enough in the World.'”

It seems to me that Kagan felt the same pull that American and British politicians did when seeing their materialistic, land-grabbing constituents. Unlike the frontiersmen, politicians were educated and powerful men, and they were also, at least publicly, religious. Politicians were pressured to pander to both the urbanites who had established churches as the center of their communities and the frontier squatters who abandoned religious community for economic prosperity. I believe that it was under this pressure that they promoted the idea of nobly advancing our civilization westward. For armed with this rationale, they could remain palatable to the church-goer while sending armed troops to help secure the frontiersmen's ill-gotten land.

The poor rural family could care less about the betterment of society or their place in the larger social network. They wanted economic autonomy and were willing to forgo the benefits of religious community and the relative safety of the cities to obtain it.

No one killed an Indian because they believed they were of a higher culture and it was therefore their moral duty. In the heat of the moment, they killed Indians because if they didn't, the Indians would kill them. After the fighting passed, when facing inquisitors they may have come up with something akin to, "hey we're Christians and we're promoting a free society," but I have a hard time believing that those noble ideals were even close to the real motives.

I'm very interested to see where Kagan takes this in future chapters. If he ends up just doing the typical baptizing of American foreign policy by saying that higher motives drove our interaction with other nation-states, I think I'll end up disagreeing with him. I tend to believe the economic interests almost always get the ball rolling and religious justification only comes about after the fact when leaders have to justify their actions (or the actions of their constituents) to the masses.

I, however, would love to hear what Kagan has to say if returns to his basic notion about how greed is the primary motivator. He's got some good insights, and as long as he doesn't loose sight of his premise, he probably has a lot of good stuff to say.