Dominio anglosajón

El porqué del dominio de la ideología anglosajona durante los últimos trescientos años. Los anglosajones -England, USA- llevan trescientos años dominando el mundo, ¿por qué? La amalgama extraña de religión, libertad, y desarrollo económico. No mimetizable más que en trozos.
 
De Walter Russell Mead, "God and Gold"; Introduction:

The decisive factor in the success of the English-speaking world, I argue, is that both the British and the Americans came from a culture that was uniquely well positioned to develop and harness the titanic forces of capitalism as these emerged on the world scene. This does not just mean that the British and the Americans were more willing and able to tolerate the stress, uncertainty, and inequality associated with relatively free-market forms of capitalism than were other countries in Europe and around the world—although that is true. It also means that the Anglo-Americans have been consistently among the best performers at creating a favorable institutional and social climate in which capitalism can grow rapidly. Because Anglo-American society has been so favorable to the development of capitalist enterprise and technology, the great English-speaking countries have consistently been at the forefront of global technological development. They have had the deep and flexible financial markets that provide greater prosperity in peace and allow government to tap the wealth of the community for greater effectiveness in war; the great business enterprises that take shape in these dynamic and cutting-edge economies enjoy tremendous advantages when they venture out into global markets to compete against often less technologically advanced, well-financed, and managerially sophisticated rivals based in other countries.

The book finds the roots of this aptitude for capitalism in the way that the British Reformation created a pluralistic society that was at once unusually tolerant, unusually open to new ideas, and unusually pious. In most of the world the traditional values of religion are seen as deeply opposed to the utilitarian goals of capitalism. The English-speaking world—contrary to the intentions of almost all of the leading actors of the period—reached a new kind of religious equilibrium in which capitalism and social change came to be accepted as good things. In much of the world even today, people believe that they remain most true to their religious and cultural roots by rejecting change. Since the seventeenth century, the English-speaking world or at least significant chunks of it have believed that embracing and even furthering and accelerating change—economic change, social change, cultural change, political change—fulfills their religious destiny.



Building on these ideas, the fourth section looks at how the Anglo-American world synthesized its religious beliefs with its historical experience to build an ideology that has shaped what is still the dominant paradigm in the English-speaking world, the deeply rooted vision of the way the world works that lies behind the physics of Sir Isaac Newton, the political economy of Adam Smith, the constitutional theories of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and the biological theories of Charles Darwin. While many of these thinkers were not particularly or conventionally religious, their belief that order arises spontaneously, "as if by the workings of an invisible hand," from the free play of natural forces is a way of restating some of the most powerful spiritual convictions of the English-speaking world. The idea that the world is built (or guided by God) in such a way that unrestricted free play creates an ordered and higher form of society is found in virtually all fields and at virtually all levels of the Anglo-Saxon world. It makes people both individualistic and optimistic, and it climaxes in what many have called the "whig narrative"—a theory of history that sees the slow and gradual march of progress in a free society as the dominant force not only in Anglo-American history but in the wider world as well.