Mead discusses his then new book entitled God and Gold:  Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World.

Maybe there are other options besides Fukuyama’s Hegelian end point of history, and Huntington’s Clash Of Civilizations with regard to our current dealings with the Islamic resurgence and its anti-modern, ant-Western, theocratic impulses (liberal internationalism and Obama’s foreign policy have certainly created problems, but there are underlying issues the West will face):

Mead argues that religion, government, free-trade, capitalism, sport, and especially naval power have shaped our two cultures which have thus shaped the world (a [economic] model he suggests originally came from the Dutch).   He is an Obama voting Democrat, a broad thinker, and teaches at Bard College.

This blog welcomes large, grand visions that posit the possibility of finding truth in philosophy, political philosophy, the social sciences and foreign policy not merely based upon reason alone, and a post-Enlightenment pursuit of reason alone which includes scientism, secular humanism, materialism, postmodernism, relativism etc. trickling down into the political realm.  Hopefully, Natural Law and Natural Right get a fair shake here in the pursuit of truth, though they needn’t necessarily be guides to constitutional interpretation.

Some of this has been in the water (the Atlantic?) lately, but it’s quite interesting.

So, it’s easy to feel vaguely good about our relationship, as happens quite practically here, but let’s not forget moments like these:

This is a depiction (thanks to impiousdigest.com) of British troops burning the White House, as they indeed did.

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Related On This Site:  Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working.  Check out his series at The American Interest.  Technology is changing things rapidly, and maybe, as Charles Murray points out, it’s skewing the field toward high IQ positions while simultaneously getting rid of industrial, managerial, clerical, labor intensive office jobs.  Even so,  we can’t cling to the past.  This is quite a progressive vision but one that embraces change boldly.  We’ll have to make things better ourselves, and our politics is way behind.

Francis Fukuyama has started a center for Public Administration at Stanford…it’d be interesting to imagine a conversation between Eric Hoffer and Fukuyama: Francis Fukuyama At The American Interest: ‘Mexico And The Drug Wars’…Has Fukuyama turned away from Hegel and toward Darwin? Adam Kirsch Reviews Francis Fukuyama’s New Book At The City Journal: ‘The Dawn Of Politics’……From The American Interest Online: Francis Fukuyama On Samuel Huntington…