Neal Gabler has an excellent column at the Boston Globe called “One Nation, Under Delusion.” He writes that the myth of American exceptionalism is going to be our downfall.
One of his arguments is that we’ve often had government that is better than the people. That’s kind of a tenuous point, I think. Basically, he’s saying that at times outstanding leaders have come forward who inspired America to do the right thing or make progressive change, even when politically unpopular. One could quibble those were exceptions rather than rules, but on the whole Gabler makes some good points.
The conclusion:
The Greeks understood that the gods punished mortals for their hubris – for feeling that they were godlike. They knew that overweening pride preceded a fall. One suspects that nations are no more immune to punishment than individuals. A nation that brooks no criticism, a nation that feels it is always better than any other, a nation that has to be endlessly flattered and won’t face the truth, a nation whose people think they possess some special moral exemption and wisdom, a nation without humility is a nation spoiling for calamity.
We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. The result may be a government that is as good as the American people, which is something that should concern everyone.
We live illusion in so many ways. We fashion our own meaning in ways that suit ourselves. There’s a disconnect from the facts which are so perverted, pre-digested and slanted by the time they’re spoon fed to us by media that it’s hard for most to elude their grasp and find any freedom of thought.
It would be nice if the problem were only one of knowledge over insight but we can’t even discern the facts.
I’m struck by the incandescent glow of televisions from every single house as I walk my dog through the neighborhood. The mass consumption of poor ideas with no connection to personal action is disheartening.
The messages in our society are so confused that it’s rare to find any consistent values. As E.F. Schumacher put it in A Guide for the Perplexed, “We are far to clever to survive without wisdom.”
Maha, thing is…? American Exceptionalism is simply the same as Exceptionalism everywhere else: a tool used by an elite to force lockstep on issues where logic won’t work, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Matters have only been made worse lately in the US by the removal of the Fairness Doctrine, giving a green light to hate radio and Faux News, among others, who expertly wield exceptionalism as one of many tools to achieve their goals. But it’s always been there; and always will. Human willingness to sacrifice intelligence for an easy, emotive solution to all problems guarantees that.
In Iraq alone we’ve killed hundreds of thousand of innocent people and displaced millions of families. We’ve labeled most of our victims as terrorist to justify our killings, and the ones who were killed where it couldn’t be denied that they were clearly innocents…we offer a lame justification of ” It’s regrettable…but they brought their destruction upon themselves by their behavior .” And to top all that off, we cling to the mindless chant of —” GOD BLESS AMERICA”.
It really, really makes me wonder what kind of a God is giving us these blessing. I see American exceptionalism as the epitome of an arrogance that destroys any possibility of spiritual or intellectual growth. It’s a cancer of the mind and spirit that is extremely debilitating .
We agree – 100% on this one.
The term “American Exceptionalism” is relatively new to me. Not more than 2 – 3 years old. While I understand what is meant by those that say/write it, it is a concept that I never bought into at all.
“American exceptionalism” can be traced back to early American history, and the term has been kicked around for at least a century. It’s behind most of our foreign policy blunders. It looms large in neocon theory, for example.
My view on this is that “American exceptionalism” is nothing more than tribalism. It is an outdated view of the world and one that will not work anymore. We all live on planet Earth and we are all humans created by the same “god” who has no special people.
I watch Carl Sagan’s series “Cosmos” often because I find him inspirational. It was first recorded back in the 70s and one comment he makes is that for the first time in human history (which by the way occupies only the last few seconds of the last day of the year if the beginning of the cosmos was measured in one year) humans have the ability to destroy ourselves. Are we going to wake up or keep doing what we have always done: Tell ourselves we are special and it’s okay to kill other humans because they are not as good as we are and it is god’s will that we rule the world. Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
But But – I have a big foam finger that says “We’re No.1”
:^)
And I thought that I paid attention.
Like I said, never in all my life would I have bought into that concept. In my travels in the Navy, I saw first hand Burdick’s “Ugly American” in action. I always thought the local people were interesting and had something to offer us as a way for Americans to learn.
Thanks for the link.
I don’t see too much wrong with thinking our country is great, the problem is when people can’t separate our greatness from the very real problems we have, and people who mistake our greatness for superiority over the rest of the world. I see nothing wrong with believing for example that both the USA and Germany are great countries. American Exceptionalism has been used by weak leaders to disguise some very real weaknesses in themselves and weaknesses that both our countries population and leadership in general are stricken with. It’s a strange and mostly misunderstood and misused term, one that the wing-nuts like to use because opposing it automatically (in their minds anyway) makes one unpatriotic. How can one say that America is not exceptional? Sort of like you don’t support the troops?
The Daily show last night (rightly) made fun of CNN for fact checking the SNL skit that claimed Obama has not accomplished anything. Am I nuts, when I see the skit I take from it that SNL is making fun of the wing-nuts teabaggers for opposing nothing (imagined socialism). Have a look here. This has been talked about quite a bit and 100% of what I have read and heard is that SNL is putting down Obama. Now I realize the dimwitted teabaggers have no sense of humor, and if SNL was making fun of Obama who cares, it’s comedy, but I just think the joke is really on the wing-nuts.
Wasn’t ‘Manifest Destiny’ the same as exceptionalism???
Wasn’t ‘Manifest Destiny’ the same as exceptionalism???
Yes. “Manifest destiny” was one of the earlier expressions of American exceptionalism.
I fear the day is coming when the bulk of the country will realize just how unexceptional we really are. Pride before the fall, and all that. The fact that it is a sacred cow, and that you have to be careful how you speak about it and with whom, says everything you need to know about how deeply deluded we are as a nation. All of this was exacerbated during the last twenty or thirty years of conservative misrule, and anyone can see the result. And Jimmy Carter apparently says dumb things too.
Well there is some history that feeds into the notion starting with the American Revolution when we gained our independence from the most powerful nation on earth and got some great documents on government, democracy and personal freedom in the process. Of course a lot of that should have been tempered by the genocide of the indigenous people and the “peculiar institution”, but the abundance of natural resources allowed the country to grow and grow wealthier and Manifest Destiny was the early term for American Exceptionalism. While the Civil War should have resulted in some great humility, it did not and after our economic might and soldiers turned the stalemate of WWI into a German defeat, we ran pretty much all hubris all the time through the 20’s. The Great Depression brought another dose of humility, but we again came to the rescue in WWII and had no real significant step back until we left Viet Nam without victory and suffered through the oil shocks and stagflation of the 70’s. Jimmy Carter tried a bit of humility and look where that got him.The guy that should have been most humbled was the most arrogant and I am sure still does not get Obama getting a Nobel Peace prize when he did not. Add to that all of the immigration to this country, both legal and illegal, and it is not too hard to see why people can sell a case for American Exceptionalism. It does not matter that statistics do not bear this out or that we are viewed around the world as a bully. Even the poorest person living on the streets of one of our major cities knows that they are better off than someone of similar status in a third world country. All this means ,of course, that when we hit those hubris killing moments, we as a people do not accept them, but rather blame the leaders for not keeping the country in its proper position.
Pathetic, most of the comments on Gabler’s well-written op-ed piece. The same old typical knee-jerk reactions, which is indicative of the very thing he was writing about… “self-hating American,” “if you don’t like it here why don’t you leave?” etc etc ad nauseum.
True greatness, on an individual level or a national one, can only come from self-examination and a willingness to improve– NOT by resting on one’s (supposed laurels).
When I think of the story of the Tortoise and the Hare I can’t help but think of the US.
The fruits of US American exceptionalism!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QncZi-MHGk
This is just a single thread in the whole nasty garment, but because I’m basically a language person, I’ve become acutely aware of how many other cultures teach their schoolchildren not just their own national language and English, but one or two additional languages as well. So you get young people from African countries who are fluent in their home language plus French and English; and then you get lazy Americans like me, sitting in a Mexican restaurant trying to puzzle out the menu. It’s like we’ve been taught to block out the rest of the world with imaginary horse-blinders… or those stupid beer-hats, with TEEVEE feeding thru the tube on one side, and STUFF feeding thru the other (cause if we’ve got Gray’s Anatomy and a Snuggie, we don’t have to care how many people at a wedding in Pakistan were killed by an American drone).
OK… that started out in one place and went somewhere else. But our history is full of examples of American educators, and other authority figures, forcibly stripping Native Americans and immigrants of their home language and culture. Heaven forbid that, even now, an American high school would teach “American kids” the Korean or Arabic or Spanish spoken by the new communities in their area. There would be riots at the mere suggestion. Instead we sit all lordly and wait for other cultures to “normalize” to ours, and we can be very rude when they prefer not to.
Because, jeez, who doesn’t want Gray’s Anatomy and a Snuggie and some nice Chicken McNuggets?
What scares me is the unexceptional American exceptionalism that’s coming. Economically, we have driven off a cliff, never to recover.
In the next decade, two or three, we will end up being a high second tier country – not that that’s a bad thing. We will have to learn to adapt like the British did. Once we adapt, it won’t be so bad. It’s the intervening years that may, and probably will, be catastrophic. How bad may depend on the Chinese. and how they decide to collect their debt.
Thank you President Reagan and 30 years of conservatives screwing the working class. Collectively, you have accomplished taking down an empire faster than the Goths and Visigoths. And, you didn’t need to raid our cities and rape our women. All you did was raid our savings and rape our retirements.
Does anyone have a version of the Chinese National Anthem that I can listen to? I get the feeling that we’ll need to know it sometime in the near future…
Well there certainly is American Exceptionalism in our ability to wage war. We might not be too exceptional in winning them but, what other country has the ability to incinerate entire families of Pakistanis while sitting in a basement lounge in the pentagon using a joystick and a video monitor. To destroy an entire extended family half way around the world with a bucket of buttered popcorn on your lap, and a king size box of milk duds at your side…is pretty exceptional to me.
The only one who can come close to that kind of American Exceptionalism would be Jehovah ,the God of Abraham who can smite anyone, at any place, at any time, for any reason.
Gabler’s column gets it. Chris Hedges makes much the same point in his book “Empire of Illusion.” Sadly, I don’t think many of our fellow citizens “get it” and they don’t want to do the hard work about making our elected representatives accountable.
It’s international, guys. Every nation has it, and the ones that have the disease of exceptionalism the worst are the ones whose empires have risen the highest. The Dutch (the Japan of the 16th century), the French, the British, the Romans, the Russians, and many others have all suffered from this. Just read their period literature, the Dutch, especially: the mix of exceptionalism and religious triumphalism is so redolent of the US during the last century as to evoke cold shivers. If I had the time, I’d post some of it for comparison’s sake.
The Dutch (the Japan of the 16th century), the French, the British, the Romans, the Russians, and many others have all suffered from this.
Yes, exactly, and in every case the myth that their nation is “exceptional” has been part of their undoing. I’d add Japan in the 1930s.
Exceptionalism (any sort) = tribalism = hubris = sin of pride. Taken any of these ways, it fosters illusion, and therefore leads to downfall.
All of that is unexceptionable. What would be exceptional is if downfall leads to disillusionment, and then enlightenment. It’s rare, but it does happen on occasion.
excuse me, ‘unexceptional’, not ‘unexceptionable’.
Balakirev, maybe we’ve become a kind of “perfect storm” of self-exceptionalism, because our culture evolved from the Romans, the British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish. I’m thinking that STUFF + TEEVEE is just the 21st Century version of BREAD + CIRCUSES.
Most of those predecessor cultures survived in some form, but I’d sure hate for us to end up like the Romans, having to sell our collective soul to some small religious cult suspected of torching the place. Which sometimes seems a likely outcome.
swami iread your blog about the drones and you are right we can do these things from halfway around the world. so. if we can do this and iknow we can why do we need more boots on the ground?
I know the history of our particular myth but I’ve found it inescapable that exceptionalism is just the symptom and the actual underlying problem is something altogether too human. And as comment before last points out not an exclusively American problem. It is a distincly human problem. Thus my initial comment.
It is also not black and white. There are severe cases and not so severe. We may have mild cases ourselves. One thing’s for certain and that in the extremem it can be a species-limiting problem…one that can get a lot of people killed in nasty ways.
Jughead… We need boots on the ground so that we can piss away 3.6 billion a month in Afghanistan..You can’t waste that kind of money fast enough by killing innocents by video games alone. How insensitive and un-American can you be to the needs of Haliburton?
Joanr16 notes:
“Most of those predecessor cultures survived in some form, but I’d sure hate for us to end up like the Romans, having to sell our collective soul to some small religious cult suspected of torching the place. Which sometimes seems a likely outcome.
Very true, and nicely put. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the US survives as a sort of UK: important, certainly, but hardly in the forefront of economic, scientific, or political developments. On the other hand, we could always become a sort of Petacostal-cum-Baptist Rome, but the notion of John Boehner impersonating Constantine fills me with a nameless dread.