The American Civil War

Virginia was a sovereign state under the union and with the union broken it was natural and unproblematic for it to act with full sovereignty. Lincoln and Washington however began the war with extremely limited sovereignty and usurping more sovereignty or acting with full sovereignty was problematic. When Napoleon made his coup d’etat, he was the head of the army and he took control of a government that was already set up to rule as a fully sovereign government of a state. Cromwell as a dictator in England ruled with full sovereignty a nation that was already constituted with it. Congress did not challenge Lincoln’s war power, even though he used it against American states, and it was the main power he had as head of a government that was not set up to be fully sovereign. It was difficult for Lincoln to act with the authority of a leader of a sovereign state because his revolutionary goal was to make a government sovereign that was not sovereign. It is debatable whether he ever reached the level of power of a Napoleon or a Cromwell but it is certain that he steadily gained power even after the early defeats of his armies and as his armies bludgeoned their way to the final victory, he became very nearly a fully endowed tyrant.

Daniel McNeill/ Read the rest of the essay at: www.usoftheworld.com/history

Transcendentalism Before and After the Civil War

   In America before the Civil War, men lived without the traditional borders of their ancestors in Europe. Men of thought and culture in America felt a release within themselves as though the old limits that gave unity to experience no longer applied to them.               

  New England Transcendentalism was a new secular religion that transcended both secularism and religion. Modern secularism excludes religious experience and walks on rationalistic and scientific grounds. Transcendentalism included any element of this kind of secularism but refused to allow its narrow view to limit other elements of experience. Descartes in the 17th century convinced thinkers that truth can be expressed only in rational and mathematical forms and this led most important thinkers to exclude thought not based on reason. Hegel, the German philosopher, wrote famously that whatever is real is rational. For Descartes, a Catholic, a whole area of experience existed beyond what could be categorized rationally. For the philosopher Kant, reality was composed of the phenomenon, the rational side, and the noumenon, the non-rational side. A New England Transcendentalist considered this split dishonest and harmful. He kept the phenomenon and the noumenon united. He was open to all possible experience and refused to conform his mind and spirit to any influence that did not register with him as genuinely his own. He lived in a land without borders and refused any borders blocking worthy experiences within himself. Ralph Waldo Emerson considered the imitation of any man a form of suicide. His non-conformity had a religious side because he believed openness to all morally good experience must lead to discoveries of the divine infused in nature by God himself. Nature held the keys to a perfect and holy human life. An individual who refused all foolish conformities must learn eventually that something is real when the divine in nature teaches that it is also morally right.

  The new secularism that transcended secularism and the new religion that transcended religion did develop however from within the Christian religion. Catholic Christianity very early introduced practices that secularized the divine. Pelagius in the 4th century taught that moral conduct and salvation could be achieved independently of God’s grace. Saint Augustine fought Pelagianism with his doctrine that only through grace could a believer be saved. Only God’s grace operating in the soul could give a human the power to resist evil and do good.  Calvinism agreed with Saint Augustine’s doctrine about grace. Humans were either directly elected by God through grace  or else were not elected and doomed to suffer the consequences.  Transcendentalism took its stand with the mass of humans condemned to live without grace and taught that they had the power within themselves to elect themselves to a glorious human life by opening their minds and souls to all possible worthy human experience.

  European thinkers criticized apostles of Transcendentalism like Emerson and Thoreau of Concord for their naïve disregard for the presence of evil. But Emerson touched the heart and mind of optimistic Americans when he taught them in his popular essays to create their own world and to rely on no one but themselves. Some American critics, eager to find nationalistic inclinations where none existed, describe Transcendentalism as a cultural break of a new nation with the old nations of Europe. It was not. Transcendentalists in New England and elsewhere, frustrated by the lack of higher experience derived from their native circumstances, sought to enlarge their experience with anything gleaned from the past in European art, philosophy, religion and literature or from any higher experience at all available to them from worldwide cultural and religious influences. Dante’s synthesis of art, poetry, philosophy and christianity was a major influence on Transcendentalists. They opened their souls to any experience that transcended their normal experience provided it was genuine.

  Transcendentalism was an expansive humanism that reached into realms of the divine that Christianity for centuries had kept locked in sacred practices and traditional constructions.  The transcendentalists were genuinely out to find the truly human. New England men with a long Protestant tradition behind them accepted the Calvinistic duality between election and damnation but refused to limit their human experience because of it. They were open to the influence of everything including Christian grace. But they knew that grace did not come from any human merit and its influence came and went without any direct human control. As far as they were concerned, everyone was morally obliged first and foremost, whether saved or unsaved, to be a worthy independent human being.

  Traditional Christian experience was an element in Transcendentalism but it influenced it indirectly and came into it, so to speak, through the back door. Christ’s life and death introduced a new human persona in history that broke radically with humanity’s past. A person could no longer be a real person with only a purely human experience. It had to also include the divine because Christ was divine-human and belief in him now added a divine experience to the merely human. Christ’s self-sacrifice  mysteriously allowed grace to enter a Christian’s soul. A Christian became truly a person by grafting onto himself  the divine. Put differently, a Christian became a whole person by finding the power through Christ to transcend the human. Transcendentalists were also after the whole person, but they believed they could become whole and thus genuine on their own. Their becoming  whole and therefore truly human was their aim. Emerson’s great lecture at Harvard College, The American Scholar, expresses  the ideal of wholeness among Transcendentalists. So does Thoreau’s Walden. New Englanders in Hawthorne’s last novel, The Marble Faun, search for higher inspiration in the great creations of art in Rome. They conscientiously ascend towards divine epiphanies in their experience while remaining steadfastly human. But the ideal of wholeness in the human makeup that transcendentalists sought and experienced did not survive the Civil War. A unified and whole America was broken. The cultural wholeness of Transcendentalism was shattered into parts that splintered off in individualistic directions that were selfish or limited. In Christian Science, a new religion with New England origins, the spiritual became totally divorced from material and human realities. It transformed the search for wholeness by belief in Christ’s divine humanity into a science that detached a practitioner from reality. Christian Science believed that only spirit was real and the material world an illusion. The new Mormon religion taught that rather than believe in Christ and miraculously discover the world of God, believers should instead raise the quality of their behavior to make themselves somehow the equal of Christ. Transcendentalism promoted the value of an active human life oriented towards spiritual and mental wholeness, but after the Civil War in a fractured society that had lost its previous unity men rushed headlong into opportunities for material success and sensual pleasures for their own sake without any connection to higher ideals. The Civil War shattered the wholeness of a union of states each with a deep sense of its own individual worth because none doubted the power and integrity of their political sovereignty.  American culture, with Transcendentalism at its top, was shattered too. At the Concord School of Philosophy founded in 1879 in Concord, Massachusetts, Hegelianism became popular. Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne believed that that the poet’s truth was the truest truth and that true poetry could  arise only from a truly whole man. They would have been shocked to learn that following their deaths a German philosophy that preached that whatever is real is rational became the dominant philosophy in Concord, the home and holy ground of Transcendentalism.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s books are for sale at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Some of his longer writings are at: www.usoftheworld.com

Failed States Made Secure

Clearly there are now states who cannot control their borders and without this power they can never be sovereign states and certainly not democratic states. Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from this condition and it was caused mainly by the United States. Can the fox who ravaged the chicken coop ever make the coop safe? It seems impossible yet the United States government alone in the past has been successful creating states with secure borders and forcing by law state governments to govern themselves democratically and without corruption. The great European nations lack a political system capable of making a state like Syria secure except as a colony ruled from London or Paris or Moscow. The government in Washington DC does not rule any of the American states and it is itself not a state. If Syria became the fifty-first American state, then Russia, Israel, Turkey and France would either retreat beyond Syria’s borders or else be blown away by the American military. Syria would be a sovereign state again with two governments, one in Washington and one in Damascus, and its political leaders in both governments would have to be elected democratically by Syrian citizens. Once elected, if they acted tyrannically or corruptly, they would be tried in court and put in jail for violating Federal laws by the Federal Department of Justice. Every state in the world can possibly lose control of its borders. They all need a world central government with just enough sovereign power to back them up militarily and judicially.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill's books are at:www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Read Transcendentalism Before and After the Civil War at: www.usoftheworld.com/culture

One Union of States From Four

Citizens of national states find joining the American union of states unattractive because they feel they would be subjecting their state to rule by another state with its center in Washington. They are wrong because the central government they would send elected representatives to is not the government of any state, is not a state, and is not located in any state. The US government located in the District of Columbia possesses no national territory. The really central question might be not whether or not independent states will join a union of states but which union. There are now 4, the Mexican union of 31 states, the Canadian union of 10 provinces, the American union of 50 states, and the European Union of 28 states. 119 states spread over one quarter of the globe have already agreed to some degree of limited sovereignty in order to benefit from the power of a union. The force behind the movement towards states with limited sovereignty has been and is now the united states on the American continent and in the Pacific. The Washington government, once established in 1790 by a Constitution based on advanced political ideas of European thinkers, admitted 37 new states over a period of 170 years. Mexico set up a union of states sharing sovereignty with a central government in imitation of Washington’s system. Canada was made a union of provinces after the American Civil War by the imperial British government fearing an invasion by the US. The European Union is the result of a long bloody history of national states continually fighting one another in devastating wars. It is also to some extent a reaction against the power gained by the American union of states. The 4 unions are great achievements of statecraft but one union of the 119 states now already with limited sovereignty would be an achievement that is both wonderful and realistic. The key feature of any union should be that states limit their sovereignty as little as possible. In the 4 unions as now constituted, the central governments are forever increasing their power at states’ expense by taking up national agendas for themselves that are often unnecessary. It is important to understand that the bigger the union, the less the central government is capable of taking upon itself national responsibilities. If the 119 states now in 4 unions became one union with its center in Washington (it would be an easy matter to have the government half a year in Washington, half in Brussels) wars between states on our planet would no longer be possible, sovereignty in all states would be stronger, individual rights of citizens and businesses would be guaranteed by universal written laws, and unbounded economic and personal opportunities would be more available for individuals free to live and work and create in any one of 119 states with full legal and voting rights simply by taking up residency. National independent states would find themselves outside these blessed new territories but they would also be allowed to enter paradise by applying to the Congress in Washington which has the right to admit them to the union spelled out in Article IV Section 3 of the Constitution.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill's books are at his author's page.www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Read Transcendentalism Before and After the Civil War at: www.usoftheworld.com/us-culture

A President and Congress Acting Serenely

President Obama has shown himself serenely at peace as a world leader. As long as the states of the world remain sovereign, isolated and divided, the president’s power and the security of federal power in Washington escape jeopardy. Washington is eternally secure as long as the world outside the United States is eternally insecure. We all need Washington and Washington makes itself necessary by working with its financial and military might for worldwide peace and democracy. It fulfills for itself practical political power by working for worldwide goals that are impossible. What a tragedy it is that the only government in the world that possesses already the means to create a real workable legal democratic worldwide union of states assiduously refuses to use it. Instead Washington sits back secure in its power and does nothing to create real tangible worldwide unity.  The Congress in Washington since 1790 over a period of 170 years admitted 37 new states to its union. Now when hundreds of states around the world need to become new states of the United States to assure their existence as prosperous democracies, Congress, once a champion at admitting new states, seems serenely blind to its own power. Its members do little more than offer the rich the pleasures of their votes at a price. They have no desire at all to unify the world by admitting new states to our union even though they alone possess the power to really unify it. President Obama acts the role of a world leader perfectly. He finds himself serenely at home on a stage erected to produce no lasting and real result.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s books are at his author’s page.amazon.com/author/graceisall

More about American culture and politics at: www.usoftheworld.com

The World Economy of the Future

Why would any state wish to maintain a military force to defend itself if it could be guaranteed security and defense by an outside military with a massive military force? Why would it need a diplomatic service if an outside government  agency could conduct diplomatic operations for it for a large union of states? If enough states unite worldwide, war and diplomacy worldwide would fade away and individual states would have sacrificed two sovereign powers now totally useless.  States in the worldwide union would be sovereign enough to assure freedom and democracy for themselves and for every citizen and every state in the union. Full state sovereignty would at last be seen for what it is, a means for a  ruthless exercise of power against state citizens and against all the citizens of all the other fully sovereign states in the world.

   How can this worldwide limitation of sovereign power come about? What state would agree to it? What state would give up its power to be independent and sovereign and become by joining the American union “a colony of America”? A state that is not afraid of the train because as soon as any state becomes an American state the train comes with it. The American economic, legal and political train. A new state would get a train roaring down the tracks into its territory right away. All American corporations blowing their whistles rushing noisily down the tracks greedy as usual to employ everyone they need to stuff their pockets with more money. The federal police from Washington hunting for interstate criminals and corrupt politicians to put into federal jails. Interference almost daily from federal agencies in Washington in the workings of their state agencies. The federal court system hearing appeals from citizens and overturning state laws that violate universal principles of human rights. The federal military, the federal navy and air force, the federal spy agencies, the federal tax agencies, the federal banking system, and on the train too people of every race in the world, American citizens, eager to buy property, eager to open businesses, eager to be citizens both of their new state and of the United States. The only serious model for the full development of the world economy is already operating in the fifty states of the American union. The union needs to be extended by adding more states. Every state everywhere should apply for admission to the US Congress which has the right to admit them. Everyone who wants a  new creative and prosperous and free world economy should get on the train.

Daniel McNeill
Daniel McNeill's books are at his author's page:
amazon.com/author/graceisall
More on subject at www.usoftheworld.com

President Obama's Last Gift to the Rich of the World

The construction of a united states of the world, of an international community of states, is not primarily about diminishing the sovereignty of states but it is about diminishing that sovereignty when its power is used to deny its citizens universal human rights due to anyone anywhere. For example, the supreme court of the state of Massachusetts ruled in 1994 that the state did not have the right to deny marriage to any two people of any sex. It diminished a state’s sovereignty justly and since then many states in the US and the world have followed the court’s lead because there are certain things that states should not have the right to do. States can still be sovereign without being fully sovereign if they give up functions that can be best done in common with other states like war and defense, like the regulation of interstate commerce, like the dispensation of universal justice by a supreme court based on universal human rights, and so forth. As a matter of fact, no state anywhere is now totally independent and as the world economy develops globally states need to renounce powers they do not need and that are better exercised by a central democratic government of a worldwide union of states.

   Multinational corporations have been for years seeking special rights for their activities in states. They are all fundamentally against the sovereign powers of the foreign states where they operate. They have a legitimate right to limit state sovereignty but they should not be the only element in society that benefits by gaining rights against states. Every citizen rich and poor should benefit. Multinational corporations have acquired the right to enter any state and operate anywhere. Every citizen everywhere in the world is entitled to the same right and it should be granted them by states joining together in a universal union of states so that all people can live and work and have full political rights in any state whatsoever simply by taking up residence in it.

   An extreme example of an unjust usurpation of rights against states is now before us. In the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, TPP, among 12 Pacific Rim states, included in the agreement is a radical diminishing of sovereign power. Under the Investor-State Dispute Settlement, ISDS, multinational corporations can challenge the policies and regulations of host-country governments. Foreign companies can appeal to a three-person tribunal that is not bound by laws of the host-country. There is no appeal from the tribunal’s decision and only foreign companies can use ISDS! States should not make laws that violate universal human rights but in this treaty multinational corporations are demanding that they give up the right to regulate them which is an unjust usurpation of state sovereignty. Such treaties have nothing to do with the global rights and interests of individuals and everything to do with the global rights and profits of corporations. President Obama is trying to force the treaty through the lame-duck session of the American Congress in November after the presidential election. The limitation of state sovereignty is an ongoing process. We should stand behind and encourage the process for the universal good of humanity and not simply for more rights and excessive profits for multinational corporations.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s books are shown at his author’s page.

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