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God and Gold
A stunningly insightful account of the global political and economic system, sustained first by Britain and now by America, that has created the modern world. The key to the two countries' predominance, Mead argues, lies in the individualistic ideology inherent in the Anglo-American religion. Over the years Britain and America's liberal democratic system has been repeatedly challeged—by Catholic Spain and Louis XIV, the Nazis, communists, and Al Qaeda—and for the most part, it has prevailed. But the current conflicts in the Middle East threaten to change that record unless we foster a deeper understanding of the conflicts between the liberal world system and its foes.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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785 people want to read
About the author
Walter Russell Mead
27 books78 followersAmerican academic. He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and previously taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He is also the Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine and a Distinguished Scholar at the Hudson Institute.
From 1997 to 2010, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy from 2003 until his departure.
Mead writes regular essays at the website of the American Interest on a wide variety of subjects ranging from international affairs to religion, politics, culture, education and the media. Over the years he has contributed to a wide variety of leading American journals ranging from Mother Jones and GQ to the Wall Street Journal. He serves as a regular reviewer of books for Foreign Affairs and frequently appears on national and international radio and television programs.
Mead is an honors graduate of Groton and Yale, where he received prizes for history, debate, and his translation of New Testament Greek. He has traveled widely in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and often speaks at conferences in the United States and abroad. He is a founding board member of New America, and also serves on the board of Freedom House.
From 1997 to 2010, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy from 2003 until his departure.
Mead writes regular essays at the website of the American Interest on a wide variety of subjects ranging from international affairs to religion, politics, culture, education and the media. Over the years he has contributed to a wide variety of leading American journals ranging from Mother Jones and GQ to the Wall Street Journal. He serves as a regular reviewer of books for Foreign Affairs and frequently appears on national and international radio and television programs.
Mead is an honors graduate of Groton and Yale, where he received prizes for history, debate, and his translation of New Testament Greek. He has traveled widely in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and often speaks at conferences in the United States and abroad. He is a founding board member of New America, and also serves on the board of Freedom House.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
May 12, 2012
Four-and-a-half-stars. Superbly written. Well-argued and diversely-referenced. Liberally spiced with wit. Considerably persuasive. Weaknesses, flaws, and omissions bark but do not bite. Authorial conjecture and induction provide a bevy of counter-intuitive and starkly clarifying insights. Lack of respect for Canada regrettable but, in the end, understandable. Confirms me in my Anglophilia and accentuates the aptitude of my being labelled as a Yank lover.
I had a few misgivings going into this, but they were dispelled within a matter of paragraphs: Mead really hit it out of the park with this lengthy and wide-ranging examination of what he interchangeably refers to as the Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon culture, and how this group has managed, over the past three hundred plus years—in effect, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that ousted James II and his Roman Catholic Jacobites from the throne of England and replaced them with the protestant union of Stuart and Orange—to maintain its dominant political, economic, cultural, and technological positions—notwithstanding that it faced serious challengers and periodic setbacks over the intervening years—by means of what what he terms a Maritime System provided of the important components of control of the trade routes, free market capitalism, religious pluralism and tolerance, and liberal democratic political institutions. Though always imperfectly implemented, and subject to the usual flavorings of violence, oppression, avarice, and injustice that accompany any historic societal repast, this Maritime System has evolved through the formulation UP->UK->US—United Provinces to United Kingdom to United States, indicating their origin in the great Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century and modern culmination in the United States of America—to represent the implementation of a Dynamic Open Society that has managed to not only endure, but to do so at the highest level and while soundly defeating any and all contenders for this apex position within the human organizational chart. Mead takes pains to stress that by Anglo-American he is not conceiving of an ethnic or racial grouping that is superior to others—though the ethnic component is one of the many pieces that comprise the whole—but rather a manner of state-of-mind superstructure applicable to Great Britain and its English-speaking colonies which organized themselves in parliamentary systems tending to a democratic liberalism, made use of their control of the world's sea routes to establish a powerful economic framework for a burgeoning market capitalism, and whose religious and political tolerance attracted and nurtured the creative minds who developed the modern sciences, commercial innovations, and military technologies which were so vital to the system's continued existence. What's more, Mead determines that once the latter has spread in size and increased in complexity beyond a certain amount, it becomes progressively more embedded into human societies, works its meme of constant change in ever wider and faster circles, and proves virtually impossible to eradicate beyond the point of repair and renovation and resurgence.
What proves of equal interest to Mead, however, is how the Anglo-Americans framed the oppositional forces they faced—so often involving France!—as against the (invariably benevolent) ends they envisioned in their selective means, and the point-of-view coming from the opposing direction. For the former, the Anglo-Americans consistently deemed their struggle to be one of good (themselves) against evil (those who opposed them). Parsing the language used by statesman and generals and intellectuals across the centuries, Mead finds the complement to George W. Bush's Axis of Evil in the parliamentary speeches of Oliver Cromwell and William Pitt. Inevitably the English-speaking countries found both the need and the conviction to believe that theirs was a struggle of the forces of light against a darkness that would enshroud the world and tarnish the Anglo drive towards the City of God upon the hill. From the competition, Mead finds a universal abhorrence for all that the Anglo-Saxon system stood for: an unslakable desire for money above all; the undermining of traditions and customs through whirlwind, destabilizing change; the promotion of a crass materialism and the pervasive spread of a vulgar low culture; the burial of the heroic and the noble beneath the gilded chains of the calculating and the base; the etiolation of national identity and local roots to the milling masses pouring into the faceless city to slave away in thrall to cosmopolitan capitalists whose avarice knew no end. The Anglo-Americans saw the future as a progression towards God's kingdom on Earth; their foes one in which Anglo modernity had shorn the world of all that was worth living and dying for. To reference Bush once more, when he proclaimed in 2001 that They hate us for who we are, Mead holds that, from the Anglo-American perspective within historical continuity, he was bang on the money.
Mead also ponders how it is that, throughout its over three centuries of existence, the Anglo-Americans always perceived that their latest victory against those who would deny them their rightful ascendency would prove to be the last one required, ushering in a flourishing endpoint of Anglo-Saxon style implementation throughout the globe that would bring peace, wealth, and happiness in its train—and how this golden age never managed to actually come to fruition. Indeed, the Anglo-Americans have often been surprised by the turns that the future would take, offering up new competitors and complexities that would test their strength—sometimes near to the breaking point—and show their optimism to have been ill-conceived. And yet, when the latest opposition was once more vanquished and victory come to pass, the rosy glasses would be donned anew, their past illusions now distant memories. Mead holds this to be the result of the Protestant religions that were prominent within the Anglo-American nations, and how they were found to be copacetic to the idea of an invisible hand at work directing the unseen forces of capitalism in order to achieve collective benefit from individual self-interest. This invisible hand was easily transplanted into the political realm, where it crystalized as the Whig Narrative, the belief in the slow-but-assured progress of civilization through history guided by this hand, whether it be directed by God (for the religious) or Nature (for the secularist).
The God portion of God and Gold is the key element, in Mead's presentation. He makes amusing and instructional usage of constructions penned by earlier English authors—one of his primary pairings is that of the Walrus, Great Britain, and the Carpenter, the United States, derived from Carroll's Through the Looking Glass—and in this section of the book he show a predilection for situating the Anglo-American historic experiment as one where the latter surprisingly often managed to attain the Baby Bear's portion of Juuuust Right when it came to their implementation across the various disciplines that comprise a civilized entity's life. In especial, the fact that neither in Britain nor its colonies did any one religious group achieve a position of dominance was vital to said religions—various offshoots of Protestantism, with sufficient Roman Catholics remaining to keep 'em on their toes—evolving from Bergsonian/Popperian Static Religions—reactionary, traditional, closed—to Dynamic Religions—progressive, experimental, developing, open. Furthermore, the predestinationism of Calvinism and Puritanism was a spur to the willingness of the citizens in early capitalist societies to devote themselves to the market-driven toil of the invisible hand; and the improvement of one's lot in life, and the subsequent benefits devolved upon one's community (and, eventually, one's country) were seen as the logical consequence of God's Grace bestowed upon these individuals and their surroundings. In one of the most fascinating chapters in the book, Mead traces how this religious element underlined much of the Anglo-American realms, morphing in its texture and teleology with the rise of secularism in the late nineteenth century, but always a present element in the belief that one's society was moving forward, in positive steps and stages, towards an endpoint at which some measure of golden closure would have been achieved.
The author finds the conflict between the theological and secular elements of the Anglo-American populations to be part of the vital mix that maintains its dynamism—religion providing the succor and support for people who might otherwise be ground down by the unending cycles of creation and destruction that inhere in Capitalism, unbelief a strong tool for taming the excesses of religious fervor and promoting the spread of rationalism and scientific experimentation that are key components of the Anglo-Saxon paramountcy. Indeed, it is the continuous admission of new and conflicting pieces into the Anglo stew that allows its systemic strength to be ever renewed. Mead likens the whole to a triangle with a spinning gyroscope within; each of the three sides stands for a single component—tradition, revelation, reason—and the gyroscope oscillates between the three, at times tending heavily towards one of the triad, at others spinning almost dead centre. Whenever one of the three components seems to have captured the gyroscope, the other two somehow increase their level of magnetic attraction in order to draw it back towards them. It is this enduring contest that inscribes how the Anglo-American world has progressed through the centuries of its existence. In the author's opinion, the moment one side captures the gyroscope with a strength that the other two cannot overcome, it will be the beginning of the end for the virile liberal democracy that has been engendered through history. It is also his determination that such a capture, by the nature of the triangle's construction, is a nigh impossible feat to achieve.
God and Gold was published right when the surge in Iraq was first showing signs of having stabilized the rampant violence and unrest, while the economic meltdown of 2008 was still an unanticipated calamity to the vast majority; it may seem that subsequent events should serve to dampen one's willingness to grant the author the accuracy of his hypothesis. Perhaps even as he was putting the final touches upon his argument prior to submitting it to his editor, China or Russia was in a position to generate enough momentum to catapult itself into the future as the primary world power and implementer of a new global civilizational paradigm. Perhaps the resurgence of religion over the past thirty years is indicative of one of the three sides of the triangle being inflated beyond redress, poised to reduce its opposing duo to irrelevance or insignificance. There is certainly no end of history in store for humanity; that nothing lasts forever is an almost indisputable truth. Mead readily admits within that his is but a thinking game, an attempt to present the reasoning behind a curious state of affairs in modern history. But he maintains that, while slumps and depressions are a part and parcel of capitalism, the more so its cyclonic dynamism is untethered from constraining regulations, and warfare a grim but inescapable portion of the lot of organized humanity, the Anglo-Americans are well-situated to emerge from such ordeals as the ultimate winners—positioned to help further expand liberal capitalist democracy and, as always, prepared to don the blinders once more in anticipation of some manner of the end of history having been, incorrectly, arrived at. For the fact of the matter is that Anglo-American societies cannot change what they are. They will remain capitalists. They will press for the spread of their system. They will endeavor to thrive amidst the maelstrom of inexhaustible change and reform. They will break laws, kill civilians, destroy competitors, fuel injustice—these all being the byproducts of the dynamic and open societies that abhor their very continued existence. We will always strive to better our world—but evil is ineradicable, and our perceived goodness can function as a blinding force of shocking breadth and power.
Many readers have objected to the final chapters in God and Gold, in which Mead expounds upon the philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr, with his belief in Original Sin being an endemic component of the human condition, and that said humans, always grossly overestimating their own importance as part of the system they live within, yet can and do try to achieve a balance to their moral lives, better their ability to understand and relate to others, both members of their community and outsiders who operate under differing frameworks. However, Niebuhr holds that we struggle to extend these individual desires to restrain our impulses and check our excesses to the societal level; indeed, within larger groupings individual beings have proven themselves to be far more willing to excuse or accept exceptional or zealous claims made on behalf of the collectivity. An otherwise quiet and hesitant person may, as a particle of a massed, seething assemblage, find himself rabidly cheering his country to war with perfervid cries of USA! USA! USA!. In Niebuhr's reckoning, this is all a part of the tragic element of our human situation, the capacity for even the noblest of societal endeavors to work evil upon the world in its unfolding—and that the only solution is for each individual to achieve a greater understanding of what is at play in the world in order that, when grouped together, it might prove possible for better—or at least less potentially damaging—consequences to be achieved from a nation's actions. However, at the same time we must understand that, at the higher political levels, personal morality and values may be, indeed often can be, impractical and dangerous to pursue. We may, in fact, have to accept that rueful but irrefutable fact that sometimes power must be answered by power. Niebuhr's political philosophy has been deemed quite unsatisfactory for many people, apparently; a manner of Christian realism that speaks of a mingling of Martin Luther King with Henry Kissinger. But Mead uses it as a springboard for his array of ideas and suggestions for what changes to the Anglo-American sphere might be both necessary and implementable at this stage in its evolutionary life. Untenable? Unworkable? Undesirable? I suppose that each reader will have to ingest its lengthy presentation and determine that for themselves. Me, I've read Moral Man, Immoral Society, and I was intrigued with Niebuhr's efforts to forge a Christianity attuned to the reality of the modern international political, economic, and cultural situation, where one could maintain one's religiosity and beliefs in a world growing more secular and riven by nationalist identifying. For better or for worse, I generally strive to live within the world as it actually exists. Certainly, my family members have labelled me as a Pragmatist and a Realist often enough that perhaps it is unsurprising that I found much of what Mead wrote here stuck to me.
This may all sound very generalized and Anglophiliac, but Mead sources a wide variety of writers and thinkers in assembling his evidence, and his case IMHO is persuasive—quite often startlingly so—and possessed of a piercing wisdom. In particular, his thoughtful reflection upon the Southern US in which he grew-up, just prior to the civil rights movement, allows him to trace the myriad ways in which, its declarations of being a bastion of traditional conservatism aside, it has changed such that it would be unrecognizable to a citizen from the fifties planted in its midst today. This microcosm serves as a potent piece of evidence for the theory he has put before the reader. His classification of what he terms the Waspophobes, those who have long held a deep enmity for the Anglo-Saxon civilization and its inexorable spread, is subtle and inspired, and this is far from a Rah!-Rah! tome for the English-speaking nations. Having established what he believes is the case, and the logic behind it, of the ascendency and durability of the Anglo-Americans, he is free to hold nothing back in his criticisms, which are frequent and, at times, devastating in their accuracy. Mead holds no illusions that this predominance is a mark of superiority by any measure except that of its proven adaptability to a world ever in flux, a flexibility that, having shown itself better than that capable of being mustered by its various foes and opponents over the centuries, has allowed the Anglo-Americans to augment or reclaim their former position with each new victory or survival attained.
The one obvious potential problem, that leaps off of the pages from the very start, is the ofttimes unwieldy grouping of Great Britain and certain of its Commonwealth Dominions with the United States: certainly there are several points throughout where Mead is forced, of necessity, to concentrate his evaluation upon the first named—for example, in delineating class structures in capitalism, the evolving political positions of the aristocracy—or the second—as when examining the startling resurgence of Evangelical religions at both ends of the twentieth century, or the clash between Capitalism and Communism in the decades posterior to the Second World War. It can lend his entire thesis the feel of one that has been carefully and selectively cherry-picked in order to bolster its plausibility; but he anticipates this objection and does his best to transfer and apply categorizations and elements pervasive in only one of the general groupings into the other—and, allowing that his assemblage really is a view from far above, I believed that it held together well enough that if other, more discerning readers can declare his presentation a failure, it will be determined from other factors than the shared linkages regarding certain particulars between English speaking offshoots derived from the British homeland.
I had a few misgivings going into this, but they were dispelled within a matter of paragraphs: Mead really hit it out of the park with this lengthy and wide-ranging examination of what he interchangeably refers to as the Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon culture, and how this group has managed, over the past three hundred plus years—in effect, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that ousted James II and his Roman Catholic Jacobites from the throne of England and replaced them with the protestant union of Stuart and Orange—to maintain its dominant political, economic, cultural, and technological positions—notwithstanding that it faced serious challengers and periodic setbacks over the intervening years—by means of what what he terms a Maritime System provided of the important components of control of the trade routes, free market capitalism, religious pluralism and tolerance, and liberal democratic political institutions. Though always imperfectly implemented, and subject to the usual flavorings of violence, oppression, avarice, and injustice that accompany any historic societal repast, this Maritime System has evolved through the formulation UP->UK->US—United Provinces to United Kingdom to United States, indicating their origin in the great Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century and modern culmination in the United States of America—to represent the implementation of a Dynamic Open Society that has managed to not only endure, but to do so at the highest level and while soundly defeating any and all contenders for this apex position within the human organizational chart. Mead takes pains to stress that by Anglo-American he is not conceiving of an ethnic or racial grouping that is superior to others—though the ethnic component is one of the many pieces that comprise the whole—but rather a manner of state-of-mind superstructure applicable to Great Britain and its English-speaking colonies which organized themselves in parliamentary systems tending to a democratic liberalism, made use of their control of the world's sea routes to establish a powerful economic framework for a burgeoning market capitalism, and whose religious and political tolerance attracted and nurtured the creative minds who developed the modern sciences, commercial innovations, and military technologies which were so vital to the system's continued existence. What's more, Mead determines that once the latter has spread in size and increased in complexity beyond a certain amount, it becomes progressively more embedded into human societies, works its meme of constant change in ever wider and faster circles, and proves virtually impossible to eradicate beyond the point of repair and renovation and resurgence.
What proves of equal interest to Mead, however, is how the Anglo-Americans framed the oppositional forces they faced—so often involving France!—as against the (invariably benevolent) ends they envisioned in their selective means, and the point-of-view coming from the opposing direction. For the former, the Anglo-Americans consistently deemed their struggle to be one of good (themselves) against evil (those who opposed them). Parsing the language used by statesman and generals and intellectuals across the centuries, Mead finds the complement to George W. Bush's Axis of Evil in the parliamentary speeches of Oliver Cromwell and William Pitt. Inevitably the English-speaking countries found both the need and the conviction to believe that theirs was a struggle of the forces of light against a darkness that would enshroud the world and tarnish the Anglo drive towards the City of God upon the hill. From the competition, Mead finds a universal abhorrence for all that the Anglo-Saxon system stood for: an unslakable desire for money above all; the undermining of traditions and customs through whirlwind, destabilizing change; the promotion of a crass materialism and the pervasive spread of a vulgar low culture; the burial of the heroic and the noble beneath the gilded chains of the calculating and the base; the etiolation of national identity and local roots to the milling masses pouring into the faceless city to slave away in thrall to cosmopolitan capitalists whose avarice knew no end. The Anglo-Americans saw the future as a progression towards God's kingdom on Earth; their foes one in which Anglo modernity had shorn the world of all that was worth living and dying for. To reference Bush once more, when he proclaimed in 2001 that They hate us for who we are, Mead holds that, from the Anglo-American perspective within historical continuity, he was bang on the money.
Mead also ponders how it is that, throughout its over three centuries of existence, the Anglo-Americans always perceived that their latest victory against those who would deny them their rightful ascendency would prove to be the last one required, ushering in a flourishing endpoint of Anglo-Saxon style implementation throughout the globe that would bring peace, wealth, and happiness in its train—and how this golden age never managed to actually come to fruition. Indeed, the Anglo-Americans have often been surprised by the turns that the future would take, offering up new competitors and complexities that would test their strength—sometimes near to the breaking point—and show their optimism to have been ill-conceived. And yet, when the latest opposition was once more vanquished and victory come to pass, the rosy glasses would be donned anew, their past illusions now distant memories. Mead holds this to be the result of the Protestant religions that were prominent within the Anglo-American nations, and how they were found to be copacetic to the idea of an invisible hand at work directing the unseen forces of capitalism in order to achieve collective benefit from individual self-interest. This invisible hand was easily transplanted into the political realm, where it crystalized as the Whig Narrative, the belief in the slow-but-assured progress of civilization through history guided by this hand, whether it be directed by God (for the religious) or Nature (for the secularist).
The God portion of God and Gold is the key element, in Mead's presentation. He makes amusing and instructional usage of constructions penned by earlier English authors—one of his primary pairings is that of the Walrus, Great Britain, and the Carpenter, the United States, derived from Carroll's Through the Looking Glass—and in this section of the book he show a predilection for situating the Anglo-American historic experiment as one where the latter surprisingly often managed to attain the Baby Bear's portion of Juuuust Right when it came to their implementation across the various disciplines that comprise a civilized entity's life. In especial, the fact that neither in Britain nor its colonies did any one religious group achieve a position of dominance was vital to said religions—various offshoots of Protestantism, with sufficient Roman Catholics remaining to keep 'em on their toes—evolving from Bergsonian/Popperian Static Religions—reactionary, traditional, closed—to Dynamic Religions—progressive, experimental, developing, open. Furthermore, the predestinationism of Calvinism and Puritanism was a spur to the willingness of the citizens in early capitalist societies to devote themselves to the market-driven toil of the invisible hand; and the improvement of one's lot in life, and the subsequent benefits devolved upon one's community (and, eventually, one's country) were seen as the logical consequence of God's Grace bestowed upon these individuals and their surroundings. In one of the most fascinating chapters in the book, Mead traces how this religious element underlined much of the Anglo-American realms, morphing in its texture and teleology with the rise of secularism in the late nineteenth century, but always a present element in the belief that one's society was moving forward, in positive steps and stages, towards an endpoint at which some measure of golden closure would have been achieved.
The author finds the conflict between the theological and secular elements of the Anglo-American populations to be part of the vital mix that maintains its dynamism—religion providing the succor and support for people who might otherwise be ground down by the unending cycles of creation and destruction that inhere in Capitalism, unbelief a strong tool for taming the excesses of religious fervor and promoting the spread of rationalism and scientific experimentation that are key components of the Anglo-Saxon paramountcy. Indeed, it is the continuous admission of new and conflicting pieces into the Anglo stew that allows its systemic strength to be ever renewed. Mead likens the whole to a triangle with a spinning gyroscope within; each of the three sides stands for a single component—tradition, revelation, reason—and the gyroscope oscillates between the three, at times tending heavily towards one of the triad, at others spinning almost dead centre. Whenever one of the three components seems to have captured the gyroscope, the other two somehow increase their level of magnetic attraction in order to draw it back towards them. It is this enduring contest that inscribes how the Anglo-American world has progressed through the centuries of its existence. In the author's opinion, the moment one side captures the gyroscope with a strength that the other two cannot overcome, it will be the beginning of the end for the virile liberal democracy that has been engendered through history. It is also his determination that such a capture, by the nature of the triangle's construction, is a nigh impossible feat to achieve.
God and Gold was published right when the surge in Iraq was first showing signs of having stabilized the rampant violence and unrest, while the economic meltdown of 2008 was still an unanticipated calamity to the vast majority; it may seem that subsequent events should serve to dampen one's willingness to grant the author the accuracy of his hypothesis. Perhaps even as he was putting the final touches upon his argument prior to submitting it to his editor, China or Russia was in a position to generate enough momentum to catapult itself into the future as the primary world power and implementer of a new global civilizational paradigm. Perhaps the resurgence of religion over the past thirty years is indicative of one of the three sides of the triangle being inflated beyond redress, poised to reduce its opposing duo to irrelevance or insignificance. There is certainly no end of history in store for humanity; that nothing lasts forever is an almost indisputable truth. Mead readily admits within that his is but a thinking game, an attempt to present the reasoning behind a curious state of affairs in modern history. But he maintains that, while slumps and depressions are a part and parcel of capitalism, the more so its cyclonic dynamism is untethered from constraining regulations, and warfare a grim but inescapable portion of the lot of organized humanity, the Anglo-Americans are well-situated to emerge from such ordeals as the ultimate winners—positioned to help further expand liberal capitalist democracy and, as always, prepared to don the blinders once more in anticipation of some manner of the end of history having been, incorrectly, arrived at. For the fact of the matter is that Anglo-American societies cannot change what they are. They will remain capitalists. They will press for the spread of their system. They will endeavor to thrive amidst the maelstrom of inexhaustible change and reform. They will break laws, kill civilians, destroy competitors, fuel injustice—these all being the byproducts of the dynamic and open societies that abhor their very continued existence. We will always strive to better our world—but evil is ineradicable, and our perceived goodness can function as a blinding force of shocking breadth and power.
Many readers have objected to the final chapters in God and Gold, in which Mead expounds upon the philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr, with his belief in Original Sin being an endemic component of the human condition, and that said humans, always grossly overestimating their own importance as part of the system they live within, yet can and do try to achieve a balance to their moral lives, better their ability to understand and relate to others, both members of their community and outsiders who operate under differing frameworks. However, Niebuhr holds that we struggle to extend these individual desires to restrain our impulses and check our excesses to the societal level; indeed, within larger groupings individual beings have proven themselves to be far more willing to excuse or accept exceptional or zealous claims made on behalf of the collectivity. An otherwise quiet and hesitant person may, as a particle of a massed, seething assemblage, find himself rabidly cheering his country to war with perfervid cries of USA! USA! USA!. In Niebuhr's reckoning, this is all a part of the tragic element of our human situation, the capacity for even the noblest of societal endeavors to work evil upon the world in its unfolding—and that the only solution is for each individual to achieve a greater understanding of what is at play in the world in order that, when grouped together, it might prove possible for better—or at least less potentially damaging—consequences to be achieved from a nation's actions. However, at the same time we must understand that, at the higher political levels, personal morality and values may be, indeed often can be, impractical and dangerous to pursue. We may, in fact, have to accept that rueful but irrefutable fact that sometimes power must be answered by power. Niebuhr's political philosophy has been deemed quite unsatisfactory for many people, apparently; a manner of Christian realism that speaks of a mingling of Martin Luther King with Henry Kissinger. But Mead uses it as a springboard for his array of ideas and suggestions for what changes to the Anglo-American sphere might be both necessary and implementable at this stage in its evolutionary life. Untenable? Unworkable? Undesirable? I suppose that each reader will have to ingest its lengthy presentation and determine that for themselves. Me, I've read Moral Man, Immoral Society, and I was intrigued with Niebuhr's efforts to forge a Christianity attuned to the reality of the modern international political, economic, and cultural situation, where one could maintain one's religiosity and beliefs in a world growing more secular and riven by nationalist identifying. For better or for worse, I generally strive to live within the world as it actually exists. Certainly, my family members have labelled me as a Pragmatist and a Realist often enough that perhaps it is unsurprising that I found much of what Mead wrote here stuck to me.
This may all sound very generalized and Anglophiliac, but Mead sources a wide variety of writers and thinkers in assembling his evidence, and his case IMHO is persuasive—quite often startlingly so—and possessed of a piercing wisdom. In particular, his thoughtful reflection upon the Southern US in which he grew-up, just prior to the civil rights movement, allows him to trace the myriad ways in which, its declarations of being a bastion of traditional conservatism aside, it has changed such that it would be unrecognizable to a citizen from the fifties planted in its midst today. This microcosm serves as a potent piece of evidence for the theory he has put before the reader. His classification of what he terms the Waspophobes, those who have long held a deep enmity for the Anglo-Saxon civilization and its inexorable spread, is subtle and inspired, and this is far from a Rah!-Rah! tome for the English-speaking nations. Having established what he believes is the case, and the logic behind it, of the ascendency and durability of the Anglo-Americans, he is free to hold nothing back in his criticisms, which are frequent and, at times, devastating in their accuracy. Mead holds no illusions that this predominance is a mark of superiority by any measure except that of its proven adaptability to a world ever in flux, a flexibility that, having shown itself better than that capable of being mustered by its various foes and opponents over the centuries, has allowed the Anglo-Americans to augment or reclaim their former position with each new victory or survival attained.
The one obvious potential problem, that leaps off of the pages from the very start, is the ofttimes unwieldy grouping of Great Britain and certain of its Commonwealth Dominions with the United States: certainly there are several points throughout where Mead is forced, of necessity, to concentrate his evaluation upon the first named—for example, in delineating class structures in capitalism, the evolving political positions of the aristocracy—or the second—as when examining the startling resurgence of Evangelical religions at both ends of the twentieth century, or the clash between Capitalism and Communism in the decades posterior to the Second World War. It can lend his entire thesis the feel of one that has been carefully and selectively cherry-picked in order to bolster its plausibility; but he anticipates this objection and does his best to transfer and apply categorizations and elements pervasive in only one of the general groupings into the other—and, allowing that his assemblage really is a view from far above, I believed that it held together well enough that if other, more discerning readers can declare his presentation a failure, it will be determined from other factors than the shared linkages regarding certain particulars between English speaking offshoots derived from the British homeland.
April 24, 2012
There are two types of anglophiles. The fun ones and the bores. Fun ones watch Doctor Who, listen to the Kinks, and know about Britain's highs and lows. The bores talk about "special" English virtues. You can see them crying for the empire, arguing for "free" trade, and talking about how Britain was the only light of liberty in a world covered in darkness. Mead falls in the later camp.
March 27, 2018
This is not a history book. Thank God it is a persuasive pamphlet, lest it gives history books a bad name. At first sight, it's fairly well-written with extensive use of literary quotes. A lot of them have to do with the Walrus and the Carpenter . Let no doubt remain as to whom is the Walrus, who are the oysters and whose are the oysters. Anyone who has watched Dogma knows where this is going.
Great Britain and the U.S.A seem to take full credit for both the development of the capitalist economy in the 16th century, disregardingFernand Braudel. Three centuries later, they kickstarted the industrial revolution and the Transformation of the World*. Uusually such bravado is reserved for sole victory in WWII - a vice they share with Russia up to the present day.
What else to expect from a man with Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World to his name who still likes Freedom Fries with his burger while he replaces the classical definition of "The West" with the Anglo-Saxon world in opposition to Europe?
If, his accusations of Washingtonphobic Occidentalism towards the Middle East are CNN-approved, so be it. But at least make the effort to find a relevant quote. A feminist scholar from Morocco will hardly aspire to describe the anti-American feelings of Arab men during the Gulf War. At most refer to America's role in a perception of the threatening intrusion of Western culture.
*The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jürgen Osterhammel
Great Britain and the U.S.A seem to take full credit for both the development of the capitalist economy in the 16th century, disregardingFernand Braudel. Three centuries later, they kickstarted the industrial revolution and the Transformation of the World*. Uusually such bravado is reserved for sole victory in WWII - a vice they share with Russia up to the present day.
What else to expect from a man with Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World to his name who still likes Freedom Fries with his burger while he replaces the classical definition of "The West" with the Anglo-Saxon world in opposition to Europe?
If, his accusations of Washingtonphobic Occidentalism towards the Middle East are CNN-approved, so be it. But at least make the effort to find a relevant quote. A feminist scholar from Morocco will hardly aspire to describe the anti-American feelings of Arab men during the Gulf War. At most refer to America's role in a perception of the threatening intrusion of Western culture.
*The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jürgen Osterhammel
June 30, 2023
Read this for the Walter Russell Mead Forbidden Courses program. I'm not a huge geopolitics, history type of guy but I did enjoy the course a lot. The book itself is really well researched and comprehensive, just not exactly my cup of tea so a bit boring. Some key takeaways from the program.
At the end of the day, liberalism, capitalism, and democracy all go along together, because they all express the same fundamental truth, "free-competition will yield the overall best result in the long-term" liberalism democracy diversity capitalism
This is also a very nature darwin natural selection idea: Darwin's idea is that in a tropical jungle, every organism competes for their own best interest over billions of years, and then yield this wonderful tropical jungle. This is also similar to adam smith idea that "If everybody in a capitalistic society pursues their own best interest, we will yield the best results". Also similar to free-trade argument, is that everybody will pursue their own interests, and we will get the most ecient production in the world. Also similar to America's foreign policy, although there is no central planner behind all of America's foreign policy, and sometimes it is a mess because they are not that coordinated, but in the long-term the foreign policy of America seemed to have worked out for America for the last 300 years. Just like democracy, although democracy is not that smart, and really slow, but in the long run it out-competes all other closed system dictatorships.
The theologians and the Catholic rights keep on advocating going back to a theocracy because they see an open-society as unstable, and we need to go back to a closed society liberalism democracy diversity
They see that an open society is not as strong of a human instinct as having super strong traditions, and violating human nature, and they see liberalism has no values in it, it's just empty pragmatism, whatever works will succeed
liberalism corrodes family values, standards of morality, (ex: too much utilitarianism, we should burn old people since they are not useful, or use some people's kidneys that they do not consider humans)
Today there are too many liberal fundamentalists - people who like to draw clear distinct red lines "this is always right" and "this is always wrong", but this deviates from the original liberalism where "We allow pluralism of expression of ideas, and some things are absolutely wrong, but most things are in the gray area"
We are in the middle of the information revolution, and we talk about it all the time, but we never really understand what it means, and think life in the future will be the same as today's information exchange that causes innovation or learning
The industrial revolution took almost 1 century to unfold, and at the beginning of the industrial revolution we were ghting with swords on a horse, and then we ended it with an atomic bomb. But in the middle, there were many years of small pockets of stagnation periods where no major changes occurred, but in the end it is for sure going to change all of our lives for sure
50 years ago we had nuclear bomb crsisi, 5 years ago we had climate change crisis, today we have AI crisis, tomorrow we will probably have the biology crisis, and everything will likely permanently create new forms of ideologies, and types of governments
At the end of the day, liberalism, capitalism, and democracy all go along together, because they all express the same fundamental truth, "free-competition will yield the overall best result in the long-term" liberalism democracy diversity capitalism
This is also a very nature darwin natural selection idea: Darwin's idea is that in a tropical jungle, every organism competes for their own best interest over billions of years, and then yield this wonderful tropical jungle. This is also similar to adam smith idea that "If everybody in a capitalistic society pursues their own best interest, we will yield the best results". Also similar to free-trade argument, is that everybody will pursue their own interests, and we will get the most ecient production in the world. Also similar to America's foreign policy, although there is no central planner behind all of America's foreign policy, and sometimes it is a mess because they are not that coordinated, but in the long-term the foreign policy of America seemed to have worked out for America for the last 300 years. Just like democracy, although democracy is not that smart, and really slow, but in the long run it out-competes all other closed system dictatorships.
The theologians and the Catholic rights keep on advocating going back to a theocracy because they see an open-society as unstable, and we need to go back to a closed society liberalism democracy diversity
They see that an open society is not as strong of a human instinct as having super strong traditions, and violating human nature, and they see liberalism has no values in it, it's just empty pragmatism, whatever works will succeed
liberalism corrodes family values, standards of morality, (ex: too much utilitarianism, we should burn old people since they are not useful, or use some people's kidneys that they do not consider humans)
Today there are too many liberal fundamentalists - people who like to draw clear distinct red lines "this is always right" and "this is always wrong", but this deviates from the original liberalism where "We allow pluralism of expression of ideas, and some things are absolutely wrong, but most things are in the gray area"
We are in the middle of the information revolution, and we talk about it all the time, but we never really understand what it means, and think life in the future will be the same as today's information exchange that causes innovation or learning
The industrial revolution took almost 1 century to unfold, and at the beginning of the industrial revolution we were ghting with swords on a horse, and then we ended it with an atomic bomb. But in the middle, there were many years of small pockets of stagnation periods where no major changes occurred, but in the end it is for sure going to change all of our lives for sure
50 years ago we had nuclear bomb crsisi, 5 years ago we had climate change crisis, today we have AI crisis, tomorrow we will probably have the biology crisis, and everything will likely permanently create new forms of ideologies, and types of governments
January 1, 2015
Some books become greater than the sum of their parts. Others, like ‘God & Gold’ feel like the parts are still at war with each other. Which is perhaps ironic given Walter Russel Mead’s (WRM) central praise of the pluralistic and competitive nature of Anglo-American societies.
The book sets out to tell the story of the impact of Britain and America on the world as a joint project. Along the way there are some sparkling sections of insight and provocation. WRM is one of the best analysts of US politics and culture, and when he strays towards this territory —which he covered brilliantly in Special Providence— the passages are compelling. Likewise, his defence of the Anglo-American world as capturing something moral and essential in human nature — in the face of its many critics — is important if not always clearly articulated throughout. A paragraph near the end of the book does perhaps the best job:
“The quest for more scientific and technical knowledge, and for the application of the fruits of that knowledge to ordinary human life, is not simply a quest for faster cars and better television reception. It is a quest to fulfil the human instinct for change, arising out of a deep and apparently built-in human belief that through change we encounter the transcendent and the divine. The material and social progress that is such a basic feature of Anglo-American society and of the broader world community gradually taking shape within the framework the Anglo-Americans have constructed ultimately reflects a quest for meaning, not a quest for comfort and wealth (p.409-410)”
There are many other sharp lines and sections, but you tend to trip over them rather than the author leading you to them. As such, I never quite felt the sense that their true nature of these gems had been sufficiently clarified or supported. Instead of a dozen carefully polished nuggets, we get a heavy sack of rocks, some with obvious potential, but many clearly grabbed at random by the author and yet to be properly worked on.
To be unfair, it feels like something less of a book than a series of long blog posts carefully tied together to feel united, but of varying quality and never quite going beyond such a depth as one might find online. I put this book down a few times and had to push on to finish it in the end. WRM is a blogger and one of the best out there, but if this book is anything to go by I fear it has had a negative impact on his efforts to write longer pieces of work.
Notably when WRM uses the insights or structure another author or book to base his analysis (from Lewis Carroll's parable of British and American power as the Walrus and the Carpenter, through to Johann Gottfried Herder & Reinhold Niebuhr) the sections shine, in part thanks to the anchoring of the other work to a core set of topics or issues. Without that, especially on the sections of European history or religion the text seems to flutter and float, less like a butterfly and more like a paper bag, blown by powerful intellectual winds but never quite in control of its own course.
As such the book doesn’t manage to make as compelling a case as it ought. Nor deal with the inevitable and important criticisms it faces. Yes we should be open to praise of Anglo-Americanism just as we are to its critics. But a book ostensibly about the issue has to deal seriously with both. Instead there is often a Panglossian type optimism that while the English and Yankees are not more virtuous they somehow manage to do everything right. And will probably continue to do so.
Inherent tensions and close run chances of fate are smoothed out. Everything is given an honourable place, especially religion which has spent so long battling the open society forces WRM praises. Yet in his telling actually forms a vital part of why open society forces work in the West. How these elements interact with each other is rarely discussed. At one point geography is the determinant of competition, with Europe’s micro kingdoms battling to thrive vs the stagnate open plains of empires in greater Asia. 50 pages on and it is now religion which kept competition afloat in the UK/US while its absence led to the deadening hand of communist purges on the mainland. Conservatism and tradition and religion do matter and do help explain the success of the West, but it has never been neat or easy and it is the nature of their defeats, not their successes which do far more to explain the outcome we see before us.
This is unfortunate, a book which took on these themes and had a slightly better sense of what it was trying to show or say would have been useful in this time of strategic realignment. I’d liked to have been able to recommend this book to others, as I have been with WRM’s Special Providence as the best book on US foreign policy – my review here - but I can’t say the same for this one.
At one point the author describes the book as a ‘thought experiment’. It feels like it, and it feels underdone. Then again, I get that sense with much of this genre of pro-west writing by those such as Henry Kissinger, Niall Ferguson and the like. Unfortunately I feel neither these authors — nor their most dismissive critics — give this vital issue of what the west represents the serious thought it requires.
This book has the intellectual capital to have done so, it just can’t quite get it onto the page properly. As such, this is a missed opportunity by a writer I continue to admire.
The book sets out to tell the story of the impact of Britain and America on the world as a joint project. Along the way there are some sparkling sections of insight and provocation. WRM is one of the best analysts of US politics and culture, and when he strays towards this territory —which he covered brilliantly in Special Providence— the passages are compelling. Likewise, his defence of the Anglo-American world as capturing something moral and essential in human nature — in the face of its many critics — is important if not always clearly articulated throughout. A paragraph near the end of the book does perhaps the best job:
“The quest for more scientific and technical knowledge, and for the application of the fruits of that knowledge to ordinary human life, is not simply a quest for faster cars and better television reception. It is a quest to fulfil the human instinct for change, arising out of a deep and apparently built-in human belief that through change we encounter the transcendent and the divine. The material and social progress that is such a basic feature of Anglo-American society and of the broader world community gradually taking shape within the framework the Anglo-Americans have constructed ultimately reflects a quest for meaning, not a quest for comfort and wealth (p.409-410)”
There are many other sharp lines and sections, but you tend to trip over them rather than the author leading you to them. As such, I never quite felt the sense that their true nature of these gems had been sufficiently clarified or supported. Instead of a dozen carefully polished nuggets, we get a heavy sack of rocks, some with obvious potential, but many clearly grabbed at random by the author and yet to be properly worked on.
To be unfair, it feels like something less of a book than a series of long blog posts carefully tied together to feel united, but of varying quality and never quite going beyond such a depth as one might find online. I put this book down a few times and had to push on to finish it in the end. WRM is a blogger and one of the best out there, but if this book is anything to go by I fear it has had a negative impact on his efforts to write longer pieces of work.
Notably when WRM uses the insights or structure another author or book to base his analysis (from Lewis Carroll's parable of British and American power as the Walrus and the Carpenter, through to Johann Gottfried Herder & Reinhold Niebuhr) the sections shine, in part thanks to the anchoring of the other work to a core set of topics or issues. Without that, especially on the sections of European history or religion the text seems to flutter and float, less like a butterfly and more like a paper bag, blown by powerful intellectual winds but never quite in control of its own course.
As such the book doesn’t manage to make as compelling a case as it ought. Nor deal with the inevitable and important criticisms it faces. Yes we should be open to praise of Anglo-Americanism just as we are to its critics. But a book ostensibly about the issue has to deal seriously with both. Instead there is often a Panglossian type optimism that while the English and Yankees are not more virtuous they somehow manage to do everything right. And will probably continue to do so.
Inherent tensions and close run chances of fate are smoothed out. Everything is given an honourable place, especially religion which has spent so long battling the open society forces WRM praises. Yet in his telling actually forms a vital part of why open society forces work in the West. How these elements interact with each other is rarely discussed. At one point geography is the determinant of competition, with Europe’s micro kingdoms battling to thrive vs the stagnate open plains of empires in greater Asia. 50 pages on and it is now religion which kept competition afloat in the UK/US while its absence led to the deadening hand of communist purges on the mainland. Conservatism and tradition and religion do matter and do help explain the success of the West, but it has never been neat or easy and it is the nature of their defeats, not their successes which do far more to explain the outcome we see before us.
This is unfortunate, a book which took on these themes and had a slightly better sense of what it was trying to show or say would have been useful in this time of strategic realignment. I’d liked to have been able to recommend this book to others, as I have been with WRM’s Special Providence as the best book on US foreign policy – my review here - but I can’t say the same for this one.
At one point the author describes the book as a ‘thought experiment’. It feels like it, and it feels underdone. Then again, I get that sense with much of this genre of pro-west writing by those such as Henry Kissinger, Niall Ferguson and the like. Unfortunately I feel neither these authors — nor their most dismissive critics — give this vital issue of what the west represents the serious thought it requires.
This book has the intellectual capital to have done so, it just can’t quite get it onto the page properly. As such, this is a missed opportunity by a writer I continue to admire.
February 5, 2012
God and Gold could be the primary, and only text, for a graduate seminar in global studies. It is a learned, complex, and yet accessible study of how "modernity" (sometimes referred to as "the west") was given birth by three successive maritime nations--Holland, the U.K, and the U.S.-- each adept in promoting prosperity through trade, innovations in finance (joint stock companies, stock markets, houses of exchange and corresponding banks) and sea-based geo-political supremacy.
In Mead's account Holland and the U.K. were colonialists/imperialists and the United States is a more abstract hegemon of open global systems that keep Eurasian powers in check while keeping Africa and Latin America under a regime of semi-benign neglect.
He contends that the U.K., whose history he has thoroughly and impressively mastered, set the stage for U.S. predominance in part through mastering the art of 1/ religious tolerance, 2/ preserving and protecting irrational but socially useful traditionalism and 3/ advancing the cause of scientific rationalism. These factors underpin what Mead, following Karl Popper, terms an "open society," that is, a society wherein natural, human, and divine law can work out their differences with a focus on marketplace advances as opposed to battlefield settlements.
There are times when this book bogs down or becomes cloudy. One less than bright spot is the late entrance of the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, founded on an acceptance of the doctrine of original sin, which Mead offers as a means of tempering American arrogance. I find it hard to take the theological dimension of American culture as seriously as Mead proposes, but rather than be arrogantly dismissive myself, let's say I'm skeptical, skepticism being a concept Mead introduces but does not fully develop in terms of Anglo-Saxon, or, as he prefers, anglican culture.
Closed societies, in Mead's paraphrase of Popper and Henri Bergson, tend to be overemphatic in one of the three principal dimensions of modern social life: the religious, the traditional, or the scientific/logical. Interestingly, he finds European nations (perhaps because they are so sick of irrational warfare) to be more in line with the scientific/logical dimension of things than the United States. Widely known statistics do show that the U.S. is more "God-fearing" and "God-believing" than Europe, but the paradox remains that the vitality of American religious experience co-exists with an almost totally secular, technologically based social style--we are materialistic, positivistic, and massively contradictory.
Ultimately, it would seem that openness can be phrased and developed in many different ways: skepticism is one way, tolerance is another, suspicion of absolute authority a third. Mead, following Niebuhr and others, essentially argues that the unknowability of the divine--God's mystery--is a healthy, humbling, tempering factor, to which Americans ought to pay more attention.
Working at the Council on Foreign Relations, where foreign policy tends to be framed within narrow, governmental terms (national interest, state sovereignty, international law and organizations, etc.), Mead stands out as someone who is prepared to think broadly about global affairs and give culture its due in assessing historical events. He doesn't write the history of wars and call it history; he looks much further afield.
In Mead's account Holland and the U.K. were colonialists/imperialists and the United States is a more abstract hegemon of open global systems that keep Eurasian powers in check while keeping Africa and Latin America under a regime of semi-benign neglect.
He contends that the U.K., whose history he has thoroughly and impressively mastered, set the stage for U.S. predominance in part through mastering the art of 1/ religious tolerance, 2/ preserving and protecting irrational but socially useful traditionalism and 3/ advancing the cause of scientific rationalism. These factors underpin what Mead, following Karl Popper, terms an "open society," that is, a society wherein natural, human, and divine law can work out their differences with a focus on marketplace advances as opposed to battlefield settlements.
There are times when this book bogs down or becomes cloudy. One less than bright spot is the late entrance of the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, founded on an acceptance of the doctrine of original sin, which Mead offers as a means of tempering American arrogance. I find it hard to take the theological dimension of American culture as seriously as Mead proposes, but rather than be arrogantly dismissive myself, let's say I'm skeptical, skepticism being a concept Mead introduces but does not fully develop in terms of Anglo-Saxon, or, as he prefers, anglican culture.
Closed societies, in Mead's paraphrase of Popper and Henri Bergson, tend to be overemphatic in one of the three principal dimensions of modern social life: the religious, the traditional, or the scientific/logical. Interestingly, he finds European nations (perhaps because they are so sick of irrational warfare) to be more in line with the scientific/logical dimension of things than the United States. Widely known statistics do show that the U.S. is more "God-fearing" and "God-believing" than Europe, but the paradox remains that the vitality of American religious experience co-exists with an almost totally secular, technologically based social style--we are materialistic, positivistic, and massively contradictory.
Ultimately, it would seem that openness can be phrased and developed in many different ways: skepticism is one way, tolerance is another, suspicion of absolute authority a third. Mead, following Niebuhr and others, essentially argues that the unknowability of the divine--God's mystery--is a healthy, humbling, tempering factor, to which Americans ought to pay more attention.
Working at the Council on Foreign Relations, where foreign policy tends to be framed within narrow, governmental terms (national interest, state sovereignty, international law and organizations, etc.), Mead stands out as someone who is prepared to think broadly about global affairs and give culture its due in assessing historical events. He doesn't write the history of wars and call it history; he looks much further afield.
September 15, 2017
4.5 stars
One of the most insightful books on the modern world and how we got here, concentrating on Anglo-Saxons who, according to Mead, ushered and cemented in capitalism, liberal democracy and modernism as we know it.
One of the most insightful books on the modern world and how we got here, concentrating on Anglo-Saxons who, according to Mead, ushered and cemented in capitalism, liberal democracy and modernism as we know it.
January 29, 2015
This book is mis-titled. It should be "Capitalism, World History, and the Meaning of Life." The scope, sweep, and ambition of this work is staggering. The final chapter is titled "The Meaning of It All." He really means "All."
Mead is ridiculously erudite. He quotes poetry alongside descriptions of early modern British history, gives short digressions on the history of technological progress, has a brief chapter in the invention of modern finance, and summarizes most world religions in an aside on the Abrahamic tradition. His wanton disregard for disciplinary boundaries; his crazed, reckless ingestion of all knowledge; his massive syntheses--these surely drive scholars up the wall. We need more thinkers like Mead.
Of course a work this massive runs risks. By covering so much ground, he covers some things he doesn't know quite so well and makes some errors of fact here and there (I caught three small errors on my first read). He seems to be at pains to check the boxes of diversity and politically correctness--perhaps wisely, because a book like this will be a target for those looking for evidence of racism, imperialism, and intolerance in his work. In places Mead meanders and indulges; but that's forgivable.
Don't let that bother you too much. There really isn't a category for a work like this. It is only barely a book of history. It is also a philosophy of history. And a history of theology. And a theological history. And much more besides. I would love this book just for its originality-- but, also, it's pretty persuasive in its main argument, which I'll leave for you to discover.
Mead is ridiculously erudite. He quotes poetry alongside descriptions of early modern British history, gives short digressions on the history of technological progress, has a brief chapter in the invention of modern finance, and summarizes most world religions in an aside on the Abrahamic tradition. His wanton disregard for disciplinary boundaries; his crazed, reckless ingestion of all knowledge; his massive syntheses--these surely drive scholars up the wall. We need more thinkers like Mead.
Of course a work this massive runs risks. By covering so much ground, he covers some things he doesn't know quite so well and makes some errors of fact here and there (I caught three small errors on my first read). He seems to be at pains to check the boxes of diversity and politically correctness--perhaps wisely, because a book like this will be a target for those looking for evidence of racism, imperialism, and intolerance in his work. In places Mead meanders and indulges; but that's forgivable.
Don't let that bother you too much. There really isn't a category for a work like this. It is only barely a book of history. It is also a philosophy of history. And a history of theology. And a theological history. And much more besides. I would love this book just for its originality-- but, also, it's pretty persuasive in its main argument, which I'll leave for you to discover.
February 27, 2018
I read almost all of this one. It was a "recommended" book for the class I am TA-ing, which means that I read it and my students did not. But that is understandable. I maybe would have asked them to read just part one, which is the first eighty pages, and then maybe the conclusion.
Mead is fun to read, especially in his first few chapters, which is basically why I kept going. He wants to change people's thinking, grand scale - instead of the rise of the "west" versus the rest of the world, Mead argues that the important dynamic is the rise of the English speaking axis, of basically the USA and Britain, and how this English speaking axis just keeps growing and winning and running the world. Things drag a bit in the middle, when he tries to argue that there's this unique "small-a anglicanness" to both British and American society, which helps them adapt and be dynamic. I don't know though. He keeps trying to argue that the USA and Britain have essentially the same relationship to religion - he needs to, for his argument that it is Anglo-America against the world - and I just do not think that is true at all. Plus there's this little gem, written in the long ago world of 2007: "...has led many observers to worry that the US might be on the verge of a kind of populist theocracy: evangelicals and conservative Catholics would merge their religious fervor with an uncritical populist nationalism. This alliance would roll back half a century of Supreme Court decisions and substitute the dictatorship of revelation for the rule of reason. This is unlikely."
Oh, well, great. Super unlikely.
Mead is fun to read, especially in his first few chapters, which is basically why I kept going. He wants to change people's thinking, grand scale - instead of the rise of the "west" versus the rest of the world, Mead argues that the important dynamic is the rise of the English speaking axis, of basically the USA and Britain, and how this English speaking axis just keeps growing and winning and running the world. Things drag a bit in the middle, when he tries to argue that there's this unique "small-a anglicanness" to both British and American society, which helps them adapt and be dynamic. I don't know though. He keeps trying to argue that the USA and Britain have essentially the same relationship to religion - he needs to, for his argument that it is Anglo-America against the world - and I just do not think that is true at all. Plus there's this little gem, written in the long ago world of 2007: "...has led many observers to worry that the US might be on the verge of a kind of populist theocracy: evangelicals and conservative Catholics would merge their religious fervor with an uncritical populist nationalism. This alliance would roll back half a century of Supreme Court decisions and substitute the dictatorship of revelation for the rule of reason. This is unlikely."
Oh, well, great. Super unlikely.
August 4, 2009
Lengthy and informative prose. Loaded with heavy content. Thoroughly researched. This is a comprehensive study of the beginning, the development, the back-sliding, the maturity and utter domination of the liberal(economic) capitalist system. It will explain how the English speaking peoples of the world have developed the greatest most successful economic system the world has ever seen; and how this system has brought about the wealth of its participants and the envy and hatred of those left behind in its economic dust. Mead carefully explains how those trying to join the capitalist juggernaut quickly get trampled underfoot by an economic system improved by the advancements and mistakes of over 400 years of clinical practice. Mead deftly skirts any pretensions of political persuasions or leanings and lets the reader come to their own conclusions about the success and future success of the American led capitalist economic system. An indispensable read for those trying to make sense of the post-911 social order.
March 16, 2015
I found the book's triumphalism more and more irritating though Mead interrupts it sometimes with modesty on "our" behalf. The problem is that there is a lot of truth here but oversimplified. Panglossian as one reviewer noted. I did like his section on terrorism where he points out that Islamic extremists are not bringing anything new into the world and he gives a list of earlier groups. I can't help thinking that if he'd toned down his panting enthusiasm, it would have been a better book.
July 19, 2022
Since I gave this book a five-star rating, I wanted to take the time to write a review justifying my praise.
I'm not sure if it's my age or some other factor, but I seem to be coming across more incredible books that stimulate my thinking, impart new ideas, and keep me thinking new thoughts and foster a desire to learn more. God and Gold is one of those books. Within the first few pages, you realize an incredibly knowledgeable and powerful mind is teaching you. That feeling grows with every page.
Walter Russell Mead addresses an unpopular question in today's academic and political climate. How has the West, particularly the Anglo-Saxon nations, become so influential in economics, warfare, politics, and social structure. Over the centuries, the Anglo-Saxon liberal democratic system has seen challenges from great powers, Spain, France, Germany, and The Soviet Union, and it has prevailed in almost all its struggles. Mead's hypothesis and argument directly oppose the faux history of the 1619 Project, its imitators, and the historical perspective of Howard Zinn and his useful idiot followers, which seeks to condemn the West and the United States as irredeemably flawed.
Throughout the book, Mead brings us back to the realities of the world. He admits the imperfections of capitalism and acknowledges that as a social and economic system, it is not suitable for all nations and all people. In doing so, he points out the follies the English-speaking countries have engaged in under the rubric of spreading capitalism and democracy. However, despite many mistakes the Anglophones have made, the fact remains there was and is something special in the combination of Anglo-Saxon history, cultural heritage, and belief. To deny that would be to deny reality.
Mead also steps into dangerous waters in contemporary thought by assigning a prominent place in the success of the Anglophone West to religion. He weaves the threads of religion, politics, and culture so carefully and beautifully that it becomes evident that faith in something greater than oneself was and is a significant force in the success of the West. He also keeps a hopeful note on the current tension between Islam and the West.
Mead issues warnings about globalization's weakness, noting that its success depends on the adoption by other nations and cultures of ideas and behaviors alien to those nations' history. He also points to the fact that the United States, as the standard bearer of liberal democratic systems, is at risk of losing its leadership role unless, as a nation, we foster a deeper understanding of the conflict between the liberal western order and its foes.
God and Gold is a powerful book, and while not easy to read, it is well worth the time. I read it first on my e-reader and underlined this book more than any I have read in the last few years. I will reread this because I know there are ideas and concepts, I did not fully grasp the first time.
I'm not sure if it's my age or some other factor, but I seem to be coming across more incredible books that stimulate my thinking, impart new ideas, and keep me thinking new thoughts and foster a desire to learn more. God and Gold is one of those books. Within the first few pages, you realize an incredibly knowledgeable and powerful mind is teaching you. That feeling grows with every page.
Walter Russell Mead addresses an unpopular question in today's academic and political climate. How has the West, particularly the Anglo-Saxon nations, become so influential in economics, warfare, politics, and social structure. Over the centuries, the Anglo-Saxon liberal democratic system has seen challenges from great powers, Spain, France, Germany, and The Soviet Union, and it has prevailed in almost all its struggles. Mead's hypothesis and argument directly oppose the faux history of the 1619 Project, its imitators, and the historical perspective of Howard Zinn and his useful idiot followers, which seeks to condemn the West and the United States as irredeemably flawed.
Throughout the book, Mead brings us back to the realities of the world. He admits the imperfections of capitalism and acknowledges that as a social and economic system, it is not suitable for all nations and all people. In doing so, he points out the follies the English-speaking countries have engaged in under the rubric of spreading capitalism and democracy. However, despite many mistakes the Anglophones have made, the fact remains there was and is something special in the combination of Anglo-Saxon history, cultural heritage, and belief. To deny that would be to deny reality.
Mead also steps into dangerous waters in contemporary thought by assigning a prominent place in the success of the Anglophone West to religion. He weaves the threads of religion, politics, and culture so carefully and beautifully that it becomes evident that faith in something greater than oneself was and is a significant force in the success of the West. He also keeps a hopeful note on the current tension between Islam and the West.
Mead issues warnings about globalization's weakness, noting that its success depends on the adoption by other nations and cultures of ideas and behaviors alien to those nations' history. He also points to the fact that the United States, as the standard bearer of liberal democratic systems, is at risk of losing its leadership role unless, as a nation, we foster a deeper understanding of the conflict between the liberal western order and its foes.
God and Gold is a powerful book, and while not easy to read, it is well worth the time. I read it first on my e-reader and underlined this book more than any I have read in the last few years. I will reread this because I know there are ideas and concepts, I did not fully grasp the first time.
February 9, 2012
Mead's monstrous tome on yesterday and today's maritime powers is everything a historical book should be: insightful, well documented, balanced and most of all entertaining. It is a powerful work that seeks to explore one of the greatest ascendancies of history, the rise of the Anglo-American maritime system hegemony and its foundations in Weberian theological asceticism and Smithian 'invisible hand' market society. While that might seem a bit dull it most assuredly is not. The book is written with bucketfuls of style and gusto, witty literary and pop culture references, humour and a passion for rhetoric and literary tricks. Highly recommended.
May 20, 2008
Walter Russell Mead is a genius, and this is a very brilliant and persuasive analysis of the similarities between American and British worldviews and how the two have come to dominate the modern world... I highly recommend this.
September 11, 2008
Don't be fooled by the title, this book is truly a must read if you spend any time thinking about America's place in the world.
January 13, 2009
Fascinating history.
January 25, 2021
It's been 14 years since Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold was published. That's one global financial crisis, one global pandemic, one Brexit, two Presidents (and starting the first term of a third), and a US insurrection ago. Does this book still have anything to tell us about "Britain, America, and the making of the Modern World"? Well, perhaps.
Despite that subtitle, this book is not a history of how Britain and America made the modern world order. It's not a history book at all, which the author acknowledges in his introduction. It's more of a philosophical dissertation. Mead takes as a given the "Anglo-Saxon" primacy in creating the modern world order, and proceeds to lay out what he sees as the underlying conditions that led to the leadership role of these two nations.
There's a lot to quibble with about this book.
First off, it's well documented, with appropriate footnotes, but there is much too much taken as given. Mead never really defines the "modern world order" that the whole book is about. Is it economic, legal, moral, technological, industrial, military, diplomatic? Mead, I think, might argue that it's all or at least pieces of all of the above, but by not defining it, he gives himself free rein to marshal his argument unfettered by definitional constraints.
Secondly, this book is way too long for the case it's trying to make. Mead wanders. And wanders. While wandering with him was fun in parts, you do get to the end of the book asking yourself whether all that wandering really bolstered the argument he's trying to make.
Mead does have a likable writing style - he keeps things moving and provides a "light touch" even when the topics of discussion are heavy subjects. He covers a lot of ground, he raises a number of points, he posits a number of arguments. Then, in the final chapter he tells you what it all means (the name of the chapter is literally "The Meaning of It All"). Like the rest of the book this is a pretty generalized discussion, but basically it says that global capitalism will eventually lead the whole world to, not Utopia, but to a "perpetual revolution" of higher and more transcendental human meaning. Really.
So does this book have anything to tell us 14 years later? About as much as it did when published. Which is to say - there is a lot of interesting stuff here, and it might lead you to pick up some of the works he references in his arguments, but ultimately, for me, it doesn't build to a wholistic, convincing argument.
Despite that subtitle, this book is not a history of how Britain and America made the modern world order. It's not a history book at all, which the author acknowledges in his introduction. It's more of a philosophical dissertation. Mead takes as a given the "Anglo-Saxon" primacy in creating the modern world order, and proceeds to lay out what he sees as the underlying conditions that led to the leadership role of these two nations.
There's a lot to quibble with about this book.
First off, it's well documented, with appropriate footnotes, but there is much too much taken as given. Mead never really defines the "modern world order" that the whole book is about. Is it economic, legal, moral, technological, industrial, military, diplomatic? Mead, I think, might argue that it's all or at least pieces of all of the above, but by not defining it, he gives himself free rein to marshal his argument unfettered by definitional constraints.
Secondly, this book is way too long for the case it's trying to make. Mead wanders. And wanders. While wandering with him was fun in parts, you do get to the end of the book asking yourself whether all that wandering really bolstered the argument he's trying to make.
Mead does have a likable writing style - he keeps things moving and provides a "light touch" even when the topics of discussion are heavy subjects. He covers a lot of ground, he raises a number of points, he posits a number of arguments. Then, in the final chapter he tells you what it all means (the name of the chapter is literally "The Meaning of It All"). Like the rest of the book this is a pretty generalized discussion, but basically it says that global capitalism will eventually lead the whole world to, not Utopia, but to a "perpetual revolution" of higher and more transcendental human meaning. Really.
So does this book have anything to tell us 14 years later? About as much as it did when published. Which is to say - there is a lot of interesting stuff here, and it might lead you to pick up some of the works he references in his arguments, but ultimately, for me, it doesn't build to a wholistic, convincing argument.
November 22, 2017
Walter engages in the proposition of a grand narrative, with broad brush stroke ideas, armed to the teeth with some of the best citations, quotations, and historical examples available, and a moral / philosophical / and scholarly flexibility; he set's upon a task no less than coming to an understanding with the making of the Modern World.
His audience is everyone from the statesman, to the economist, to the historian, and even to the casual reader trying to understand how the world around him came to be. From any one of these views, there are parts of this book of exceeding relevance and others which will likely appear dry or confusing. In fact, without the right background of study, this would not be an easy book to digest.
Despite these limitations and Walter's considerable bias [judaeo-christian, western-centric, liberal capitalism, Chicago school], and perhaps because Walter is so aware of the counter-arguments to and criticisms of his world view; I found a fairly well-constructed argument. One grounded in relatively reasonable supposition, and while I can't say I agree with all his theses. The main points are definitely taken under consideration.
The key value I found in this book was derived from the creative framing of world history in a system that aligns more with Niall Ferguson's Ascent of Money than most geopolitical treatise and from it's impeccable developed writing [Some sections like that in which Walter waxes on about the unique wonder of Anglo-Saxon finance are simply beautiful and I know I will be looking back upon it for future reference in the years to come]
His audience is everyone from the statesman, to the economist, to the historian, and even to the casual reader trying to understand how the world around him came to be. From any one of these views, there are parts of this book of exceeding relevance and others which will likely appear dry or confusing. In fact, without the right background of study, this would not be an easy book to digest.
Despite these limitations and Walter's considerable bias [judaeo-christian, western-centric, liberal capitalism, Chicago school], and perhaps because Walter is so aware of the counter-arguments to and criticisms of his world view; I found a fairly well-constructed argument. One grounded in relatively reasonable supposition, and while I can't say I agree with all his theses. The main points are definitely taken under consideration.
The key value I found in this book was derived from the creative framing of world history in a system that aligns more with Niall Ferguson's Ascent of Money than most geopolitical treatise and from it's impeccable developed writing [Some sections like that in which Walter waxes on about the unique wonder of Anglo-Saxon finance are simply beautiful and I know I will be looking back upon it for future reference in the years to come]
May 13, 2023
Mead's thesis is that the modern world order was created by the British 300 years ago, with the United States assuming management responsibility in the 20th century. Together they run what he terms the "family business", which consists of a global system of power, finance, culture and trade.
The Anglo-Saxons (basically the English speaking countries) are no longer an ethnicity but a shared culture; less bound by tradition, more willing to embrace change, tolerant of dissent and accepting of the chaotic and sometimes painful transformations that capitalism creates and demands.
He reviews how the English developed a propensity for compromise and the concept of a loyal opposition. Spends a lot of time on the 17th century religious and political wars leading up to the ultimate compromise, the Glorious Revolution of 1688. After which English society became more open in regard to religion and politics. All very interesting.
Talks about the need to balance the three main aspects of a society; reason, revelation and tradition. In regard to religion, examples would be atheists, fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics. Mead argues that all three are needed, but if any one becomes dominant and left unchecked it will go too far. Anglo-Saxon society has been able to toggle between all three aspects; which is a noisy and messy system but it does produce a dynamic and open society. He also explains how non-Anglo societies often view the English system with suspicion, disdain and sometimes outright hostility. A valuable explanation for Americans who often wonder "why do they hate us'?
A very provocative and valuable book. His thesis is powerful and provides a very reasonable explanation for how todays world came to be and where it might be heading.
The Anglo-Saxons (basically the English speaking countries) are no longer an ethnicity but a shared culture; less bound by tradition, more willing to embrace change, tolerant of dissent and accepting of the chaotic and sometimes painful transformations that capitalism creates and demands.
He reviews how the English developed a propensity for compromise and the concept of a loyal opposition. Spends a lot of time on the 17th century religious and political wars leading up to the ultimate compromise, the Glorious Revolution of 1688. After which English society became more open in regard to religion and politics. All very interesting.
Talks about the need to balance the three main aspects of a society; reason, revelation and tradition. In regard to religion, examples would be atheists, fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics. Mead argues that all three are needed, but if any one becomes dominant and left unchecked it will go too far. Anglo-Saxon society has been able to toggle between all three aspects; which is a noisy and messy system but it does produce a dynamic and open society. He also explains how non-Anglo societies often view the English system with suspicion, disdain and sometimes outright hostility. A valuable explanation for Americans who often wonder "why do they hate us'?
A very provocative and valuable book. His thesis is powerful and provides a very reasonable explanation for how todays world came to be and where it might be heading.
February 1, 2023
Here's a book that I fought with from start to end.
Triumphalist, smug, possibly worse, in its lauding of the Anglo-American maritime culture and its role in forming the world over the last three centuries, the book feels at times like a giant sales pitch to society leaders... and the author is obviously eminently suited to that. At the same time, there are sections where opposing views ("why they hate us") are examined, lucidly and with a genuine feel for how it would be to wear those shoes.
The author draws from a wide range of sources and illustrations, and although I would argue with much of what is stated or concluded, it was an enjoyable and educational read.
15 years on from publication, any new edition would surely require a proper overhaul, as events (especially within the Anglo-American bubble) have rendered this text more out of touch than it was at the turn of the century. Indeed, the book itself feels like a core of well-rehearsed socio-political theory, which has been dressed up subsequently with rather superficial elements to fit a more immediate contemporary application. In other words, it could do with a thorough re-working. But there are many valuable and thought-provoking elements throughout.
Triumphalist, smug, possibly worse, in its lauding of the Anglo-American maritime culture and its role in forming the world over the last three centuries, the book feels at times like a giant sales pitch to society leaders... and the author is obviously eminently suited to that. At the same time, there are sections where opposing views ("why they hate us") are examined, lucidly and with a genuine feel for how it would be to wear those shoes.
The author draws from a wide range of sources and illustrations, and although I would argue with much of what is stated or concluded, it was an enjoyable and educational read.
15 years on from publication, any new edition would surely require a proper overhaul, as events (especially within the Anglo-American bubble) have rendered this text more out of touch than it was at the turn of the century. Indeed, the book itself feels like a core of well-rehearsed socio-political theory, which has been dressed up subsequently with rather superficial elements to fit a more immediate contemporary application. In other words, it could do with a thorough re-working. But there are many valuable and thought-provoking elements throughout.
March 24, 2018
内容简介 · · · · · ·(from chinese edition)
这是一部令人豁然开朗的著作，内容是创造了近现代世界的全球政治和经济体系的诞生和崛起，这一体系首先由英国支撑，如今靠美国维系。
沃尔特•拉塞尔•米德是美国最为杰出的外交政策专家之一，他解释了英美两国卓越地位之关键在于盛行于英美的宗教中的个人主义意识形态。米德解释了为何这种 意识形态在适应在两国都繁荣兴旺的资本主义的过程中起到独一无二的文化作用。我们从中可以看到两国如何能够创立一个自由民主的体系，其经济和社会影响持续在全球增长。
依靠自己的才智、气魄和绝佳的洞察力，米德实际上详述了英语民族及其敌人数世纪以来的战争故事。依靠对周围海洋的掌控而得以维持，英国和它的美国继承者在过去的三百年间建立了一个政治、权力、投资和贸易全球体系。沿此路前行，两国发展出复杂精密的大战略，这令英语国家的全球权力和威望达到历史上前所未有的高峰。
目录 · · · · · ·
前言
第一部分海象和木匠
第一章 上帝站在我们一边
第二章在沙滩上
道地的英国人
霍萨和亨吉斯特
第三章他们如何憎恨我们
恐白人盎格鲁-撒克逊新教徒的世界
漫长战争
第二部分他们全都恐惧又嫉妒
第四章格林威治长老们的协议
“我一直尊敬西班牙国王”
西进历程
第五章法国吐司
伟大的敌手
第六章世界是他们的牡蛎
大流散
另一个英帝国
看不见的帝国
第七章权力的支柱
私人信用
消费信用
美国银行
第八章伊顿的球场
从佩普西到百事可乐
旅行革命
资讯
大众文化
奥卡姆剃刀
他们自己的联赛
第九章金发姑娘和西方
它是如何做到的？
做对事情
第三部分盎格鲁-撒克逊态度
第十章白人盎格鲁-撒克逊新教徒“黄蜂”和蜜蜂
第十一章牧师与发电机
分崩离析
第十二章教义对教义
第十三章白皇后
动态宗教，动态社会
第十四章成为律师
第十五章陀螺仪与金字塔
传统的变迁
启示的更新
理性的兴衰
归营号角已吹响
向前进，再回首
第四部分上帝创造了何等奇迹
第十六章历史的意义
历史之父
第四种信仰
第十七章对历史的战争
近现代历史
对历史的战争
第十八章黄金模因
看不见的手
辉格史观
上帝的选民
第十九章辉格巴比伦
不同规则
文化冲突
第五部分历史的教训
第二十章海权的未来
美国在衰落吗？
“如何成为第一”
五点计划
第二十一章与灵共舞
宰牲
文明的危机
第二十二章文明的外交
第二十三章一切的意义
不断革命
这是一部令人豁然开朗的著作，内容是创造了近现代世界的全球政治和经济体系的诞生和崛起，这一体系首先由英国支撑，如今靠美国维系。
沃尔特•拉塞尔•米德是美国最为杰出的外交政策专家之一，他解释了英美两国卓越地位之关键在于盛行于英美的宗教中的个人主义意识形态。米德解释了为何这种 意识形态在适应在两国都繁荣兴旺的资本主义的过程中起到独一无二的文化作用。我们从中可以看到两国如何能够创立一个自由民主的体系，其经济和社会影响持续在全球增长。
依靠自己的才智、气魄和绝佳的洞察力，米德实际上详述了英语民族及其敌人数世纪以来的战争故事。依靠对周围海洋的掌控而得以维持，英国和它的美国继承者在过去的三百年间建立了一个政治、权力、投资和贸易全球体系。沿此路前行，两国发展出复杂精密的大战略，这令英语国家的全球权力和威望达到历史上前所未有的高峰。
目录 · · · · · ·
前言
第一部分海象和木匠
第一章 上帝站在我们一边
第二章在沙滩上
道地的英国人
霍萨和亨吉斯特
第三章他们如何憎恨我们
恐白人盎格鲁-撒克逊新教徒的世界
漫长战争
第二部分他们全都恐惧又嫉妒
第四章格林威治长老们的协议
“我一直尊敬西班牙国王”
西进历程
第五章法国吐司
伟大的敌手
第六章世界是他们的牡蛎
大流散
另一个英帝国
看不见的帝国
第七章权力的支柱
私人信用
消费信用
美国银行
第八章伊顿的球场
从佩普西到百事可乐
旅行革命
资讯
大众文化
奥卡姆剃刀
他们自己的联赛
第九章金发姑娘和西方
它是如何做到的？
做对事情
第三部分盎格鲁-撒克逊态度
第十章白人盎格鲁-撒克逊新教徒“黄蜂”和蜜蜂
第十一章牧师与发电机
分崩离析
第十二章教义对教义
第十三章白皇后
动态宗教，动态社会
第十四章成为律师
第十五章陀螺仪与金字塔
传统的变迁
启示的更新
理性的兴衰
归营号角已吹响
向前进，再回首
第四部分上帝创造了何等奇迹
第十六章历史的意义
历史之父
第四种信仰
第十七章对历史的战争
近现代历史
对历史的战争
第十八章黄金模因
看不见的手
辉格史观
上帝的选民
第十九章辉格巴比伦
不同规则
文化冲突
第五部分历史的教训
第二十章海权的未来
美国在衰落吗？
“如何成为第一”
五点计划
第二十一章与灵共舞
宰牲
文明的危机
第二十二章文明的外交
第二十三章一切的意义
不断革命
July 17, 2024
I picked this book up on the dollar rack of Grey Matter Books on Crown Street in New Haven while a grad student. This was my second attempt, and I'm very glad I finally finished it.
Walter Russell Mead provides a thorough account of anglo-american colonial desires from the middle ages to the present, drawing parallels between the British Empire and the current American Empire throughout. I found the justifications for colonial conquest as justifiable by "God" shocking, yet highly believable given the results.
I felt most engaged by the first half of the book, but it is certainly a very good book for anyone wanting to understand the modern world.
Walter Russell Mead provides a thorough account of anglo-american colonial desires from the middle ages to the present, drawing parallels between the British Empire and the current American Empire throughout. I found the justifications for colonial conquest as justifiable by "God" shocking, yet highly believable given the results.
I felt most engaged by the first half of the book, but it is certainly a very good book for anyone wanting to understand the modern world.
October 3, 2018
Meade does a critical analysis of what made Great Britain the leading power in Europe for roughly two hundred and then-some years, and how it's unique placement at the edge of the Europe and its political stability and relative religious pluralism made it possible for developments in modern capitalism that put Britain in that primary place.
May 21, 2018
Awesome and insightful book! But it still is too deep for me...
December 26, 2018
Interesting ideas but not an easy book to get through. Curious how the author will update it.
May 14, 2019
Contrary to the book's title, Mead writes very little about how Britain and America made the modern world. There isn't even anything on Bretton Woods.
January 24, 2012
This is a history of the Anglo-Saxon "maritime order." Mead differentiates the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy from the rest of Europe (and the world) by their effective use of naval power to dominate global trade and foreign policy. This is a fascinating perspective on the world and how Britain and America have come to dominate, why they will continue to do so--even in the face of massive sovereign debt.
Mead's perspective as an historian gives him a great deal of optimism (as an Anglo-Saxon anyway) in America's future role in global politics. This is in direct contrast with those (such as Patrick Buchanan among many others) prophesying a decline in American hegemony. Mead sees the sovereign debt and imperial overstretch as policy mistakes with no major long-term consequences. He remains confident that the Anglo-Saxon heritage in Britain and America will ensure a long-lasting political leadership.
I was absolutely fascinated with his chapters on the rise of the British empire--particularly in regards to the massive debt and the constant hand-wringing it caused. He makes a compelling case for the insignificance of debt. This stands in direct contrast to the Austrian school of economics, which predicts disaster--and which remains the much more compelling argument. It does seem a bit naive to suppose "it can't happen to the Anglo-Saxons" though it has happened to everyone else.
Mead is a thorough-going pragmatist and defender of global empire. His solutions toward the end are rather muddled and far too indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr. But there's a lot of good stuff in this, and I would recommend it.
Mead's perspective as an historian gives him a great deal of optimism (as an Anglo-Saxon anyway) in America's future role in global politics. This is in direct contrast with those (such as Patrick Buchanan among many others) prophesying a decline in American hegemony. Mead sees the sovereign debt and imperial overstretch as policy mistakes with no major long-term consequences. He remains confident that the Anglo-Saxon heritage in Britain and America will ensure a long-lasting political leadership.
I was absolutely fascinated with his chapters on the rise of the British empire--particularly in regards to the massive debt and the constant hand-wringing it caused. He makes a compelling case for the insignificance of debt. This stands in direct contrast to the Austrian school of economics, which predicts disaster--and which remains the much more compelling argument. It does seem a bit naive to suppose "it can't happen to the Anglo-Saxons" though it has happened to everyone else.
Mead is a thorough-going pragmatist and defender of global empire. His solutions toward the end are rather muddled and far too indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr. But there's a lot of good stuff in this, and I would recommend it.
August 12, 2019
People who read Walter Russell Mead’s work, God and Gold, doesn’t need one lengthy introduction from this review.
The encyclopedic book somewhat influenced my views on religion, among other things. Published in 2007, months before the ascent of a new US President and the so-called Great Financial Crisis, it offered what many popular works at the time simply did not bear: God.
The emphasis on behalf of the populace (the so-called American wasps) was nothing new, and neither an only-in-America phenomenon. People are by now familiar with the Nimbies (not-in-my-backyard movements) in countries like China, Japan, and OECD states. These conservative, literate, civic-minded folks who for-better-or-worse have been intruding modern politics.
Not the typical proto-marxians of inner cities and liberal institutions; their names may be different, intergenerational, but basically the same when it comes to interests— transparency in government, anti-corruption, and discipline — but for Mead, this curiosity often evokes the spiritual.
While lacking the fierce scrutiny of so many recent books (It’s too polite to be an apologetic for a whole generation of wasps and nimbies, tension less, and tribal less than some of recent literature referenced in the book), its authenticity, however, lies in being too canny and insightful. More like one of the borrowed poems and classic pamphlets used in Mead’s work.
Four Stars.
The encyclopedic book somewhat influenced my views on religion, among other things. Published in 2007, months before the ascent of a new US President and the so-called Great Financial Crisis, it offered what many popular works at the time simply did not bear: God.
The emphasis on behalf of the populace (the so-called American wasps) was nothing new, and neither an only-in-America phenomenon. People are by now familiar with the Nimbies (not-in-my-backyard movements) in countries like China, Japan, and OECD states. These conservative, literate, civic-minded folks who for-better-or-worse have been intruding modern politics.
Not the typical proto-marxians of inner cities and liberal institutions; their names may be different, intergenerational, but basically the same when it comes to interests— transparency in government, anti-corruption, and discipline — but for Mead, this curiosity often evokes the spiritual.
While lacking the fierce scrutiny of so many recent books (It’s too polite to be an apologetic for a whole generation of wasps and nimbies, tension less, and tribal less than some of recent literature referenced in the book), its authenticity, however, lies in being too canny and insightful. More like one of the borrowed poems and classic pamphlets used in Mead’s work.
Four Stars.
November 27, 2011
"If empires of evil have much in common across the centuries, so too do alliances for good. America and its Cold War allies, like the Protestant allies of Cromwell's England, were fighting for more than their own -- perish the thought -- selfish interests. Their fight is the fight for good, right, and human rights everywhere." (23)
"The passion for simplicity and the belief that simple is forceful shapes Anglo-American life in many ways. Cutting to the chase, paring the fripperies and frills away to get to the essence, is not just the hallmark of American philosophy, cinema, and cuisine. This is the imagination that discovers new, cheaper, and faster ways of using the production line. This imagination develops a simple advertising message to push a new product. It cuts away at the excrescence and traditions of business practice to discover the most efficient way to organize a business. In finance, it ruthlessly penetrates to the heart of a proposition." (167)
"Britain became a world power with an economy much smaller than some of the countries that opposed it. It is therefore not obvious that a decline in the relative size of a country's economy translates automatically into a declining political position." (351)
"The passion for simplicity and the belief that simple is forceful shapes Anglo-American life in many ways. Cutting to the chase, paring the fripperies and frills away to get to the essence, is not just the hallmark of American philosophy, cinema, and cuisine. This is the imagination that discovers new, cheaper, and faster ways of using the production line. This imagination develops a simple advertising message to push a new product. It cuts away at the excrescence and traditions of business practice to discover the most efficient way to organize a business. In finance, it ruthlessly penetrates to the heart of a proposition." (167)
"Britain became a world power with an economy much smaller than some of the countries that opposed it. It is therefore not obvious that a decline in the relative size of a country's economy translates automatically into a declining political position." (351)
April 8, 2019
Have you ever stop and think for a minute why the Anglo-Saxons’ (English and American) influences are so prevalent in our lives, wherever we are? Be it hollywood films, bottles of coca cola, or free trade and liberal democracy. They are so dominant, that, armed with their sets of belief and value, managed to win against french and spanish catholics, german fascists, soviet communists, and currently locking horns against middle eastern islamic fundamentalists, with result to be determined. The answer lies within Anglo-Saxons unique place in history. Open to innovations yet unusually pious, with whiggish optimism that one day the world will be united under set common values, that are, the values they espouse, ushering in what Fukuyama called ‘the end of history’. However, the gospels of free trade, democracy and globalism are often met with derisions, and the Anglo-Saxons must stop moving ahead so carelessly, for the order that they built, the maritime order, will inevitably prevail in the end. All that needed to do is only to smoothen its arrival. Overall, it was a fascinating experience for me, reading this book. I am quite amused by the author’s assertion that christians, muslims and (wait for it), the godless atheists are very much the same.
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