REAL VALUES - MATERIAL COMFORT, FREE TRADE
I think we should define the word 'values' as referring to positive motivating forces, things we believe in, things that give us a sense of the future, a future to be worked for - even if that future is seen as the preservation of things we value that we believe already exist. In the previous essay I argued that through the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and in particular the suppression of the monasteries, Britain had taken what we might call in very general terms the striving of the relative towards the Absolute out of the realm of practical concerns and confined its aspirations to the realm of the relative, essentially the realm of human material wellbeing. I was interested to see Maududi expressing a similar view - that while still professing a doubtless perfectly sincere belief in God the society had become for all practical purposes atheist. The practical work of salvation was regarded as God's work and men were free to get on with more earthly concerns. Within the British ruling class the ideal was civilisation and the model was pre-Christian Rome. The great classical expression of British ruling class values in the eighteenth century - Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - is a polemic against Christian Rome.
I think it would be true to say that a large reason for the success of Christian missionaries would have been the perception that if Europe and the US had become so overwhelmingly dominant in the world their religion must be true, it must have God's blessing on it. And of course, despite Jesus' own declaration that His kingdom was not of this world this was an argument that would be used by Christians themselves. (2)
(2) I develop this point in my essay 'Christianity and the Financial Crisis', also on this website.
So if we want to summarise the values that Britain imposed on the world they might go something like this: a religion which didn't impose too much on our time and energies; a philosophy that regards civilisation, meaning a reasonable degree of material comfort, as the highest human ideal; a considerable technical and administrative expertise; perhaps a high degree of military prowess though I'm inclined to think this may be an exaggeration. We did have a great ability to get other people to fight our wars for us, and we did - and this was very important - dominate the seas. An absolute conviction with regard to our own racial superiority (a theme I develop in the earlier piece); a willingness to wipe out whole peoples, what Sir Charles Dilke called 'the cheaper races', when they got in our way (another theme developed in the earlier piece); and all this put to the service of an overriding commitment to 'free trade', meaning the right to sell the excess of our industrial production anywhere in the world.
If we think of values as a powerful motivating force then we have to admit that beside all that democracy, individual liberty and all the rest of it makes a rather poor showing.