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brutish, anarchic self, which the early Puritans feared and sought to subdue. The wilderness
could be seen as a barren waste land or spiritual darkness where the Devil lurked. Only
through the sweated labour of men and women could anything decent and godly be made
of it. Meaning and truth issue from the hand of Man. To make something intelligible is to
draw it from the demon-ridden darkness into the sacred clearing illuminated by the light
of reason. In subjugating the world in obedience to the word of Genesis, Man himself be-
comes a mini-Creator, conjuring order out of chaos. The belief that truth is a human cre-
ation, a popular doctrine in American philosophy, harks back to this vision. Without Man,
the world withers.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who thought, incidentally, that America had less interest in philo-
sophy than any other civilised nation, writes in proto-Marxist style of the conquest of
Nature in early America. “The American people,” he remarks, “see themselves as marching
through wildernesses, drying up marshes, diverting rivers, peopling the wilds, and subdu-
ing nature.” Yet the land, he argues, was not fertile enough to sustain a prosperous class of
landlords alongside one of tenants, so there was no material basis in the country for an aris-
tocracy. For that, you need large estates, not parcelled-out pieces of soil. He also points out
that America's encounter with the wilderness threw European history into reverse. Whereas
Europeans evolved from so-called barbarism to civilisation, the early immigrants to Amer-
ica confronted a supposedly virgin Nature while themselves being “the product of eighteen
centuries of labour and experience.”
As an immense region of untapped natural resources, America lay at the feet not of noble
savages who would have been incapable of utilising it, but of educated, urban-bred, soph-
isticated men who plunged into its forests furnished with “Bible, axe, and newspapers.”
The country, in short, was born of a felicitous time warp. For the newcomers, if not for the
natives, it was the most fortunate conjuncture imaginable between the wild and the cultiv-
ated. What greater capitalist fantasy than that of an industrious people suddenly supplied
with limitless natural resources to be exploited? It is the Robinson Crusoe myth on a spec-
tacular scale. No wonder the nation was thought to be a work of Providence.
Anything Is Possible
Because of the all-powerful will, Americans are great believers in the fraudulent doctrine
that you can do anything you want if you try hard enough. In no other country on earth
does one hear this consoling lie chanted so often. If you want to fly to Rio and there is no
airport to hand, simply want it as hard as you can and feathers will sprout spontaneously
from your biceps. When the United States finally killed Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama
declared with mathematical predictability that it was an example of how the country could
do anything it set its mind to. He did not mention that ten years is a rather long time for
the omnipotent will to creak into action. One wonders why the nation does not put its mind
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