American Exceptionalism

So many different groups of people claim the title, "The Chosen People," something that's an easily understood euphemism for privilege, that human life on the planet once again finds itself in another ludicrous situation. The obvious question is this: how can so many different groups be special--and not just special but the only special ones? It doesn't really matter precisely how any one particular group managed to get this designation, although it's often seen as a divine gift or responsibility: of course, that so many groups believe they are the privileged group almost inevitably encourages conflict with some other group, which may or may not make claim to the same distinction. Having a sense of privilege encourages people to think of themselves as the natural rulers of others (and defeating them creates slaves who can reinforce a feeling of divinely sanctioned privilege) or provokes anxiety when encountering another group making the same claim. Hence American exceptionalism, often seen as divinely bestowed on this country. Instead of seeing American power as mainly the result of viciously conquering a relatively sparsely populated land with a less technologically advanced population and of a continent filled with valuable resources (and at first a mostly pristine environment), many Americans, like so many other groups of people now and in the past, claim a divine mandate. (This undergirds the notion, often promulgated in commercials, that individuals deserve certain things.) There's nothing wrong, I suppose, with having confidence, though unearned confidence is always worrisome. It would still be possible to have a social democracy within American borders even with this sense of exceptionalism, although in much of American history we have made distinctions within the country as well, designating certain people as true Americans (white, male, wealthy, etc.) and others as natural serfs or even below the threshold of humanity. To criticize this tendency to see one's group (and, ultimately, oneself) as privileged is understood to be an act of existential terrorism, thus cutting off all discussion and analysis.

Privilege

One problem, of course, is how to reconcile the inherent human need for privilege and the possibilities of social democracy. Human history would suggest that, for the most part, they cannot be reconciled: we cannot find a way to be concerned about a more general social good and our own need to feel special, to feel that we have the often unearned right to something that others don't. De Toqueville in The Ancient Regime and the French Revolution argues that the revolution was not just an uprising that manifested itself out of the blue: French society was already changing during the years before the revolution, and the emergent middle-class and newly land-owning peasantry found the unearned privileges of the aristocracy unendurable, yet following the revolution, France quite quickly reverted back to a centralized administration. The French revolution didn't alter the fundamental cultural perspectives of the French: it just removed a heretitary government and replaced it with a middle-class bureaucracy, a system that already was in place before the revolution. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss--same as the old boss. Ok, when The Who function as meaningful sources of political understanding, we're in trouble.

Everyone Wants to be Special

Why do people gamble when the odds are close to certain that they will lose money? Obviously because they enjoy it. But why do they enjoy it? There is the pleasure of occasionally winning, of course. But that doesn't completely explain it as that pleasure much be matched, and even overmatched, by the more common losing. There almost certainly is some social pleasure--although plenty of people gamble alone at a slot machine. My sense is that people gamble because when they win they feel special--a kind of Hobbesian exhilaration or Veblenian status. I won and you didn't: even the remote possibility of that occurring is what propels them to lay down money that will most probably be lost. This is undoubtedly related to human competition in general and may indeed account for all sorts of odd human behavior--the compulsion to shop, the inability to cooperate, the need to display wealth and to dominate others.

Yet this need to feel special is, from another perspective, deeply problematic, for it means that most people make decisions based on emotions, not logic. It is particularly problematic in a democracy where individuals often vote in seemingly incomprehensible ways--, for example,voting against their own interest. And it may account for the reality that many people often support dictators or moral monsters because they believe that this person will make them part of somthing special--the dominant or exceptional nation, for example. La Boetie's On Voluntary Servitude would seem to reinforce this notion--one can feel special through a kind of identification with someone else or some fantasy.

The La Boetie piece I know only through reading Sarah Bakewell's A Life of Montaigne, a very intelligent biography and commentary on the French writer. And I've read Montaigne on and off over the years, but her discussion really clarified his attraction. He makes clear our limitations and our inconsistencies: he conveys what it feels like to be alive and conscious, in our limited and inconsistent way. Perhaps his perspective underlies the moral imagination--the ability to imagine someone else's life, an ability sorely lacking in many individuals. (I say this conscious, I think or hope I think, of my own limited moral imagination.)

Lord Russell and the Nature of Truth

I finally finished The History of Western Philosophy in which Bertrand Russell essentially sees that history as a long series of missteps and misunderstandings. Most philosophers, Russell contends, have based their ethical and political systems on their metaphysical systems: in this way, they are like poets who begin with an assumption and then proceed to write a poem, never really considering the nature of their original assumption. Yet it would seem inconceivable that philosopher after philosopher would be incapable of interrogating his original assumption--although one supposes that, in any intellectual process, one must start somewhere. Nonetheless, while philosophers are not necessarily responsible for the subsequent horrors their ethical and political systems anticipate--Russell looks at Plato, Rousseau, Byron, and Nietzsche, among others, as leading to Hitler and Locke as leading to Roosevelt and Churchill and Bergson to Vichy--there is still the suggestion that, in some way, their status as "philosophers" ultimately legitimated the ethical and political monstrosities that did eventually emerge (although Roosevelt may not necessarily be included as a progenitor of a monstrosity). Russell is particularly keen to criticize subjectivist or idealist philosophers and their systems, for they inherently diverge from any kind of shared (not necessarily objective) sense of truth, either allowing for a worthless democracy of truths (truth is what each individual believes is true or what each individual simply creates as true--e.g., the Bush administration) or the truths of self-identified "great" or "noble" men (or man) who then proceed, in general, to impose their truth on others. "The concept of 'truth' as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control," writes Russell, "has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness--the intoxication of power . . . to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone" (828). Where this humility can be found in previous philosophers as Russell discusses them is not clear to me; still, as he wrote the book mostly during World War II and its attendant horrors, there is much to agree with in this statement. He concludes: "I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster" (828).

Feeling Small

Here's something from Stephen Jay Gould: "Six millions years ago at most, if the molecular clock runs true . . . , we shared our last common ancestor with gorillas and chimps. Presumably, this creature walked primarily on all fours, although it may have moved about on two legs as well, as apes and many monkeys do today. Little more than a million years later, our ancestors were as bipedal as you or I. This, not later enlargement of the brain, was the great punctuation in human evolution" (The Panda's Thumb, 132). Of course, Gould's point has more to do with refocusing on what he considers the more important evolutionary transformation--bipedalism, not brain size. But. for me, again, the sweep of time--so casually waved away with a "six million years" or "a million years later"--is almost too much to comprehend. Actually, it is too much to comprehend. It would be easy to dismiss whatever joys and agonies we experience in life with the larger sense that, in the larger sense, it just doesn't matter. The awful effort of the human to make sense of the senseless. I read an infuriatingly bad history of Chicago and finally was drawn only to the photographs, one in particular of people waiting to enter the Chicago World's Fair of 1893--each with his or her mind and consciousness and every one of them long dead and gone: as gone as any impossibly ancient human ancestor. Surely someone was lying on the African savannah, however many million years ago, and looked up and around and wondered what it was all about. That moment of self-consciousness is the awful miracle of our existence, a bizarre, anomalous instance of something in the incomprehensibly large universe that came together in such a way and asked the simple question, "Why?" Or more ironic is the idea that consciousness was no meaningful adaptation--rather just the unanticipated side effect of brain enlargement, a mutation that helped an otherwise vulnerable species survive. The ability to ask the question "why" doesn't help us improve our chances at reproduction--it just came along. Lucky, huh?

I'm Back

I'm back, with a host of comments on books I've read. Here something from Melbourne, a 1950's biography of the Whig Prime Minister William Lamb, born and bred for leadership, so to speak, but clearly one of the most useless human beings ever to be alive. In the late 1820s he was appointed Irish Secretary, and this is what an oblivious David Cecil has to say about the Irish--this is, recall--written in the 1950s: "Under a frail veneer of eighteenth-century manners, [Ireland] wallowed in bloodstained medieval chaos. The Protestant governing class divided their time between bullying the natives, wild Hibernian rollickings and killing each other in duels. The mass of the people, savage, superstitious and on the edge of starvation, now fawned on their masters in oriental servility, now gathered together in secret societies with fantastic names--Caffees, Bootashees, Whiteboys and Ribbonmen--to plot their overthrow by means of atrocity and assassination" (193). Where to begin? "Savage"? "Superstitious"? "Oriental servility"? Lamb himself liked to do nothing, and when faced with momentous challenges to the feudalistic governing system in England, did everything to delay, defer and vacillate. Yet the Irish are seen as "natives'--much like any usual group of barbarians, barely under control of themselves. Is this the history of the world: a kind of ignorant incapacity to understand others who, through the very policies and actions devised by their masters, deign to rebel against the intolerable? I can see parallels between George W. Bush and William Lamb, useful tools for a coporate elite.