The Noblest Offspring

Are Americans stupid, or Europeans poor?

The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime 

Barren of every glorious theme, 

In distant lands now waits a better time, 

Producing subjects worthy fame. 

In happy climes, where from the genial sun  

And virgin earth such scenes ensue, 

The force of art by nature seems outdone, 

And fancied beauties by the true; 

In happy climes, the seat of innocence, 

Where nature guides and virtue rules, 

Where men shall not impose for truth and sense 

The pedantry of courts and schools: 

There shall be sung another golden age, 

The rise of empire and of arts, 

The good and great inspiring epic rage, 

The wisest heads and noblest hearts. 

Not such as Europe breeds in her decay; 

Such as she bred when fresh and young, 

When heavenly flame did animate her clay, 

By future poets shall be sung. 

Westward the course of empire takes its way; 

The first four acts already past, 

A fifth shall close the drama with the day; 

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

Bishop Berkeley, the Anglo-Irish philosopher best known for his notorious “immaterial” system of metaphysics, composed the above verses as a hype-piece for his scheme to journey across the Atlantic and found a college in the colony of Bermuda. The poem, at least, was a success: after three years spent winning friends and influencing people to his cause, Berkeley sailed in 1728 from London to the New World with a fresh wife and the word of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole that a generous Parliamentary grant would be issued to him shortly. Unfortunately, the promises of a politician meant so little then as they do now; though Berkeley made it at least to Rhode Island, where his plantation, Whitehall, still stands, the money he had been led to expect never materialized. In 1732, after some four years spent drawing up elaborate designs for a utopian city, Berkeley abandoned his plans and returned to England.

Besides serving as a curious historical anecdote, this little misadventure cannot fail to make one wonder what America might have looked like if the bishop had succeeded in his venture and properly planted arts and learning in our virgin earth. Alas, his vision persists only as a hollow echo at the so-called university that bears his mispronounced name and serves to train shock-troops against everything good and beautiful and true that Berkeley held dear.

Perhaps, as well, we would be spared that most tedious of pointless debates which recurs periodically in our online space: are Americans stupid, or Europeans poor? Such discussions rarely go anywhere because, of course, both sides are correct. However, by the same token, both accusations are rooted in the insecurity of the respective speaker. Despite recent victories which have given us cause to hope, both regions are facing existential crises. The hearts of our respective illnesses are, furthermore, complementary: America suffers from a lack of roots, while Europe suffers from a lack of energy. The mutual hostility is an attempt by each party to avoid facing its own disease; the resentment is so powerful that we form a caricature of the other as an object of derision to avoid admitting it is the very thing we need to survive. 

This cultural conflict between the Old and New Worlds is nothing new. As Berkeley’s verses demonstrate, even in the 18th century, Europe felt itself to be exhausted as a civilization. Such fatigue is not irregular. It is the course of history that a certain elite shall rule and a society will crystalize around it, until the rulers have expended their collective energy and are promptly replaced by a new aristocracy. And, in Berkeley’s time, Europe’s leading families traced their ancestry (as those that remain generally do even today) all the way back to the Germanic chieftains who had overrun the frayed Roman empire over a millennium earlier. 

However, through what must be an accident of history if not surest proof of providence, Europe had discovered a New World just as its political foundations began to show cracks. Ever since, whether it was Cavaliers fleeing Cromwell to Virginia, then Regicides hiding out in Connecticut, religious malcontents emptying the Rhineland into Pennsylvania, or failed revolutionaries waking up from the fever-dream of 1848 to find themselves somewhere in the Dakotas, America served as a pressure release valve for the old continent. While this tremendous concentration of talent and drive made America a great nation, it also left Europe’s aristocracy to continue its descent into decadence, and to be replaced only haphazardly, in ad hoc fashion, rather than with a great surge of strength, energy, and triumphant will which would have left it refreshed, reborn, rather than merely further exhausted. 

As a further misfortune, those who came to America under such circumstances did so with tremendous chips on their shoulders. The Old World had failed them one way or another, and its heritage was scorned as sour grapes. Therefore, especially after Independence, America came to understand itself not as an outgrowth of European civilization, but as something antagonistic to the Old World which must reject if not outright overthrow it. This bitterness extended beyond the realm of pure politics (where republican, if not entirely democratic, virtues boasted moral and intellectual superiority to European monarchies) into all areas of culture, from Walt Whitman’s attempts to found a new American poetry free from all traditional constraints of metre and rhymes, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s desire to create a completely original “Usonian” architectural language. 

Of course, there have been more measured attempts seriously to engage with European culture, such as Longfellow’s translation of Dante and his Evangeline (a hexametre epic on the expulsion of the Acadians, which aims to weave American history into a shared European literary tradition), or Henry James’ masterful Portrait of a Lady. However, in the absence of a pathological hatred of the old, one tends instead to find an equally pathological slavishness towards Europeans as generally more intelligent and cultured. This indeed has been an issue long before the days of John Oliver; one should never forget that proto-Libtard Abraham Lincoln had his fatal meeting with John Wilkes Booth during a performance of an English comedy about a boorish American cousin. 

Of course, these tensions reached a higher pitch and took on a more genuinely hostile tenor with America’s conquest and occupation of Europe at the end of the Second World War. Europe could no longer content itself to scoff at America as silly and backwards, as now it was under America’s thumb. Furthermore, as America emerged as the global hegemon, it had finally to begin embodying what had previously only been an ideal: to be a universal state, one for all people regardless of particularity. Several centuries of anti-European attitudes left America defenseless as waves of immigration began to erode its implicit national character and ethnic identity. Indeed, these sudden, violent demographic changes have been routinely celebrated as the fulfillment of our “propositional nation’s” foundational ideals. Meanwhile, the peoples still in Europe lack the energy to preserve what culture they have left, or likewise encourage their own destruction out of a perverse desire to seem more enlightened than their American overseers.  

As stated above, these illnesses are complementary. America is wasting its energy, talent, and potential because it rejects its particularity and wants to pretend to universality. Instead, then, of building cathedrals, composing brilliant symphonies, patronizing great painters, and bringing up our children in a literary tradition that stretches back through Chaucer to Homer, we spend our money and time on giant inflatable balloon animals, NFTs, endless books about rich girls from the Bay Area who are sad because their ancestral kimchi recipe died with their grandmother, and propaganda films about how our own ancestors are history’s greatest arch-villains. Europe, meanwhile, may carry the torch of high culture, but lacks the vitality to throw new wood on the fire and can do little more than serve as a watchman as the continent decays into, as it so often derided, an “open-air museum” and waits to go gentle into that good night. 

The solution begins in America. As the energetic center of western civilization, we hold the potential for change. Americans must get past their inferiority complex and learn to see themselves as what we truly are: not an antagonist but a child of Europe. Perhaps we may flatter ourselves that, in Berkeley’s words, the “noblest offspring is the last;” we have certainly earned the distinction of having the greatest dynamism and industry. Europe, at the same time, must stop resenting America for its tremendous success, and learn to emulate it in the spirit of healthy sibling rivalry. Undoubtedly this will require some political restructuring, and the changes appear already underway. America’s nativist turn should be taken for what it truly is: a chance to accept ourselves as a fundamentally European nation, not merely one of abstract ideas. Europe’s effort to remilitarize, to stand up for and defend itself, signal the Old World may be ready for rejuvenation. To this end, both sides will help each other. Europe will remind America of what it is, while America will remind Europe of why.