In my younger days I was more sanguine about the ease of transplanting classical liberalism upon foreign soil. For did not our Declaration of Independence state that ALL men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights? Did not Winthrop proclaim us to be the “city upon a hill” as an example to the world, and did not Lincoln say we were “the last best hope of earth?
Then in later years I recalled the lessons my gentleman-farmer dad taught me in the Massachusetts farm where I grew up – soil must accommodate a crop. He reminded me that our Pilgrim ancestors brought with them seed from England that failed, and how the Wampanoags taught them to grow native corn by placing small fish in with the seed, to counteract the acidity of New England soil.
So too it is with cultural soil, and Anglo-American culture has roots that go back almost 2000 years to the “thing.”
What “thing,” you might ask, and how old is it? The first written reference to the “thing” is in the writings of the historian Tacitus in 98 AD, and the earliest archeological evidence was found upon a stone pillar along Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, carved by Germanic mercenaries in the 3rd century AD, which began “Deo Marti Thincso…” “God Mars of the Thing…”
The “Thing” was a meeting in Germanic and Viking culture of all freemen to solve disputes, legislate, choose chieftains and kings, and judge cases according to the law as recited by a “lawspeaker.” Smaller local “things” would appoint delegates to regional “things,” functioning like our modern federal system. The phraseology survives today in the names of the legislatures of Iceland, Althingi (General Thing), Denmark, Folketing (People’s Thing), and Norway, Storting (Great Thing). It found root in England in the areas under Viking control under the name Wapentake (touching of weapons, a ritual at Things) and in the areas under Anglo-Saxon control as folkmoot (people’s meeting). This folkmoot was the forerunner to the witenagemot, or royal council, the seed which grew into the British Parliament.
The 1066 Norman conquest only placed a veneer over these longstanding cultural institutions, and, of course, when King John got too pushy in this regard, he was forced to sign something called the Magna Carta (Great Charter) in 1215, which included Clause 39: “No free man is to be arrested or imprisoned, or disseized, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way ruined, nor will we go against him, or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or in accordance with the law of the land.”
“Legum terrae.” The “law of the land” was superior to any royal power. It was not until the 17th century that the concept of divine right slithered its way into the minds of Kings such as James I of England and Louis XIV of France, both of whom would have successor-descendants literally lose their heads over the matter. Their view was rex lex, the king is law. But, as a pamphlet put out by Presbyterian Minister Samuel Rutherford put it, the opposite was true: Lex rex, the law is king.
As tensions between the American colonies and the mother country increased in the middle of the 18th century, it was their rights as Englishmen under English Common law that they sought to defend at first, the famous cry of “taxation without representation is tyranny” being among these rights. In most homes in colonial New England there were at least two books: the King James Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries Upon the Laws of England. They were not out to turn the world upside down. Then the peculiar American cultural “soil” began to produce a new “hybrid crop”: a founding not based upon rights granted by the grace of kings, parliaments, or common law, but by “the laws of nature, and nature’s God.” Without a king or a nobility, and with American pluck, ingenuity, and courage, they eventually devised a system of federal power that was enumerated and separated, leaving the rest to the states or to the people.
Crucially, though, they did NOT devise a system of populus rex, or mob rule, which became the fate of the French Revolution. Our founders were influenced by Locke and Montesquieu, NOT Rousseau. Prominent among our founders was John Adams, who stood against mob rule, putting his own safety on the line by successfully defending the British soldiers accused in the so-called Boston Massacre. His “Thoughts on Government” was a blueprint of our current system.
As for foreign countries, we can and must encourage, as best we can, the development of stable systems at least in part answerable to their people and recognizing basic human rights, but in doing so, we must work with the cultural conditions upon the ground. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are not going to appear ex nihilo in these faraway lands. Japan has such a government because at the end of World War II, we let the country keep its emperor, its Diet, and many of its traditions. We simply tried to carve away what had gone so terribly wrong in the prior decades. We can but mourn over the fate of Russia, a warm people with a culture steeped in the arts and literature, with vast natural resources, who, when given an opportunity, fell back into the “strong man” tyranny their cultural soil calls forth.
As Americans, we should be thankful for our unique cultural soil. We should nourish and preserve it, carefully cultivating our well-ordered liberty.
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