Читать книгу Statecraft - Margaret Thatcher - Страница 19

Given leaders of resolution and foresight, and with the support of her allies, the American superpower has the material resources to prevail. But does it have the moral resources? I predict that this question will come to be asked even more frequently in the wake of the terrorist onslaught of 11 September. That outrage was aimed directly at the heart of America’s culture, values and beliefs.

Osama bin Laden once described Americans as ‘a decadent people with no understanding of morality’.* His contempt for America’s fighting spirit has already been shown to be misplaced. But what of his and his fellow fanatics’ scorn for our kind of liberal society?

It should be said at once that remarkably few Westerners view all that constitutes Western society today as perfect. Indeed, with us self-criticism is second nature. We worry openly about family breakdown, the dependency culture, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse and violent crime. We are all too conscious that a rising standard of living has not always brought with it a higher quality of life.

But at this point the critics and the enemies of our society part company. What conservative-minded Westerners want to see is the strengthening of personal responsibility in order to make our free society work. What our enemies demand is altogether different: it is the imposition of a dictatorial system in which neither freedom nor responsibility is valued, one where all that is required of individuals is obedience.

The Founding Fathers believed that although the form of republican government they had framed was designed to cope with human failings, it provided no kind of substitute for human virtues. For them American self-government meant exactly that – government by as well as for the people. James Madison knew that democracy presupposed a degree of popular virtue if it was to work well. In Number 55 of the Federalist Papers he wrote:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form* [Emphasis added]

The Founding Fathers and those who came after them had different religious beliefs, and sometimes none. But they were convinced that the way to nourish the virtues which would make America strong was through religion.

It is beyond my purpose to describe the complicated and still-evolving story of relations between Church – however defined – and state in America.* But when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 that Americans held religion ‘to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions’ he was recording a very wise observation.

Whenever I go to America I am struck by the unembarrassed way in which the divinity keeps making an appearance in political discourse. And this reflects the fact that so many Americans are so deeply religious. Surveys have shown that two-thirds of Americans say that religious commitment is either the most important or a very important dimension of their lives, and America, far more than Britain or Continental Europe, is a church-going country.† And the natural, collective response of Americans to the tragedy of 11 September was to fill the nation’s churches. America’s faith, including its faith in itself and its mission, is the bedrock of its sense of duty.

That is yet another reason why we non-Americans can make our own the words of the poet Henry Longfellow:

Thou, too, sail on O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!‡