American Exceptionalism
Glenn Greenwald, concerning president Obama’s speech about Libya, and more generally about the idea of American Exceptionalism, yesterday;
The fact remains that declaring yourself special, superior and/or exceptional — and believing that to be true, and, especially, acting on that belief — has serious consequences. It can (and usually does) mean that the same standards of judgment aren’t applied to your acts as are applied to everyone else’s (when you do X, it’s justified, but when they do, it isn’t). It means that you’re entitled (or obligated) to do things that nobody else is entitled or obligated to do (does anyone doubt that the self-perceived superiority and self-arrogated entitlements of Wall Street tycoons is what led them to believe they can act without constraints?). It means that no matter how many bad things you do in the world, it doesn’t ever reflect on who you are, because you’re inherently exceptional and thus driven by good motives. And it probably means — at least as it expresses itself in the American form — that you’ll find yourself in a posture of endless war, because your “unique power, responsibilities, and moral obligations” will always find causes and justifications for new conflicts.
It’s a nice political point on the President’s behalf to insist that he has proven his belief in American exceptionalism. That insulates him from a political vulnerability (i.e., from the perception that he rejects a widely held view), which is nice if politically defending the President is an important goal for you. But the harder — and far more important — question is whether this American exceptionalism that you attribute to him is actually true, whether it’s well-grounded, and whether it should serve as a premise for our actions in the world.
I’ve come to recognize that American Exceptionalism is a species of idolatry; that idea that we are a Nation Set Apart, a Shining Beacon on a Hill and so on, ought to make Catholic Americans deeply uneasy, to say the least.
Dr King spoke the following about the Vietnam War in particular, but I believe it is even more true today;
And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power.”
There’s a hymn we sing occasionally at my parish, which presents a much more balanced view than the hubris-addled America-as-messiah propaganda that saturates American life. It goes like this:
This is my song, oh God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mineMy country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
This is my song, thou God of all the nations;
a song of peace for their land and for mine.This is my prayer, O Lord of all earth’s kingdoms:
Thy kingdom come on earth thy will be done.
Let Christ be lifted up till all shall serve him,
And hearts united learn to live as one.
Oh hear my prayer, thou God of all the nations;
Myself I give thee; let thy will be done.
Jesus said to them,
“And as for you, Capernaum, Will you be exalted to heaven?
You you shall be brought down to Hades.” Luke 10: 13-16
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I take heart that in the Church’s 2000+ existence, she has seen her fair share of nations come and go. America will be no different, and no Bush or Obama can change that.
Our view of things here in Asia is that Bush, Obama AND the Catholic Church will “come and go,” and that the important thing, in this “Kali Yuga” era is to support, wherever possible, the “good Dharma“–which you Americans call “doing the right thing.”
Now, it is sometimes impossible to know what the “good Dharma” is, on a simply abstract, intellectual basis, but one way of telling whether someone is adhering to it, by his own lights–whether someone is being intellectually and emotionally honest in attempting to be just–both to himself and to others–and whether he or she is striving to be fully empathic in his or her decision-making–is to try to ascertain what personal risks he or she is actually incurring in attempting to achieve the kind of integrity that is in keeping with protecting the “good Dharma.”
I personally have little confidence that Obama has much integrity when it comes to issues of economic and social justice; I sense that he’s far more of a social-Darwinist upholder of dog-eat-dog capitalism within the United States than his leftist supporters ever imagined. When it comes to foreign affairs, however, my perception is that he is a radical innovator who recognises–accurately, in my view, as someone who lives in Asia, and who intends to pick my lot among the Asians henceforth–that the world is changing VERY rapidly and that the United States of America will not have the same role to play in the foreseeable future as it has heretofore, and that, therefore, SHE had better cast HER lot with those elements of the developing world (and particularly its young people) whose aspirations are similar to those which have traditionally been American (but which American foreign policy in the past has not accurately represented).
His actions in the Libyan crisis reflect, I think, this perspective of Obama’s, and we can know that he is acting in “good faith” (in allegiance to the “good Dharma“) by the very fact that he is risking his Presidency in order to do what HE (and his immediate circle of advisors) perceive to be the “right thing”:
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/30/obama_libya_air_strike_undoing_gene_lyons/index.html
I’m sorry, but I could not fault him for this action, even if I agreed that it is so rash as some dithering “liberals” in America and Europe think it is (which I and most Asians I talk to don’t believe; we think that the Qaddafi regime is going to fold like a house of cards, but that the aftermath WILL be as messy as democracy usually is. What my Asian friends are beginning to wonder, however, is whether SOME Americans actually like democracy as much as they’ve claimed to).
Pretty good stuff, except about the Church, which God Himself has promised will never go. But aside from that, not bad at all.
Magnificent post, Matt. Thank you.
You’re welcome, Mark. I’ve been meaning to post on this for awhile.
Thank you so much. I am not Catholic but Evangelical Protestant. Still, I commend you for this article. At my home church, there are some people, just some, to whom I would rather confess marital infidelity than I would express my belief that God has no particular partiality towards the United States. It drives me nuts when I hear people talking about “getting America back to a time when it was a Christian nation.” Not that I don’t have some serious disagreements with some of the directions that the country is taking today, but I still want to ask them when this illusive imaginary time in our history was. Was it back in the day when African-Americans had to sit in the back of the bus? Was it in the 1800′s when treaty after treaty stole land from the Indians? Or was it when one of the most common businesses in the American West was prostitution? Was it at the drafting of our Constitution when the Founding Fathers made a pact with the Devil by declaring black people to be 3/5 of a person, and also allowed the slave trade to continue legally for another 30 years? I even think that it is at least defensible to argue that the American Revolution violated Romans 13.
I love my country as much as any reasonable person would, but I think that the patriotism of the extreme Christian embraces a form of idolatry.
Robert