I've been meaning to mention Moira Breen's excellent little essay on the American "vice of niceness," which she casts as "the loss of the gift of contempt."
We operate not by more formal codes of manners but by a ritualized familiarity and friendliness - which is often seen as "false" and phony in the way that Americans can see traditional formal manners as "false". We think friendliness and the effort to be inoffensive should be understood everywhere... [Our] own fundamentally egalitarian view of human relations (which is a good thing, properly applied), seems to blind us to the simplest facts of human nature.[James] Woolsey [in a previously-cited interview in the Jerusalem Post] quotes an unnamed scholar of the Middle East:
When this is over, either we are going to be held in contempt in the Mideast as we are now, or we are going to be feared and respected. There is nothing in between.
Such a statement, which I absolutely believe to be true, utterly befuddles many Americans, particularly on the left. They occupy a world of social relations not defined by the poles of respect and contempt , and it disturbs them to contemplate one that is. This niceness, this inability to judge and despise, has been condemned as moral relativism (in the case, for example, of John Walker) - and it is. But the loss of the gift for contempt defines perhaps the American form of this relativism - what you get from people who are fat and happy and friendly and... nice. Too nice to feel contempt, and therefore too nice to understand it.
It seems to me, though, that the problem goes deeper than mere discomfort. The idea that we ought to be able to triumph simply by setting a good example (the idea behind "appeasement," past and present) popped up everywhere in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It could, of course, be seen most clearly among those justly exposed to general ridicule as "Sontag Award" nominees. If only, the theory goes, we had been wise and good enough to conduct ourselves according to the precepts of [insert personal ideological or policy obsession here,] no one would hate us and want to blow us up. The corollary: if we adjust our policies so that they are more pleasing to our enemies, these enemies will no longer pose a threat to our security and well-being and will go away.
As a solution to our practical problems, this line of thinking is dubious in the extreme. In fact, it has always struck me as a kind of magic, 1wherein operations and rituals we perform upon ourselves are supposed to have a transformative and determinative effect on the world outside. If we sacrifice Israel and maintain a state of ritual purity, our hierophants and high priestesses tell us, the dark forces of Islamist terror will be appeased, and the gods will reward us with a calming of the seas, peace, prosperity, fertility, and a bountiful harvest. (Incidentally, I wonder if a similar political magic also inheres in our domestic disputes, like abortion, where practical considerations are given a back seat to the quest for the ideal euphemism... more about that later, perhaps.) At best, it's feeble-minded wishful thinking, borne of a fervent desire to avoid the ineluctable logic of war (deemed aesthetically objectionable) that when enemies are trying to destroy you, you must beat them to it-- Gen. Patton's advice to make the other son of a bitch die for his country. Worse still, it's an excuse for evading responsibility, and, at the very worst, a self-loathing program for contriving ones own demise.
It has often been said that, perhaps because of our Puritan heritage, America is a nation of idealists. This is really another way of saying that we are a nation of frustrated idealists. There seems to be a widespread belief that idealism is only desirable in a "pure" theoretical form, and that such idealism always becomes irrevocably corrupted and morally suspect the minute it is acted upon. Orwell once wrote that "political language-- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists-- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Are we no better than our foes? Because of our deeply-held belief that this is not the case, Americans are extraordinarily sensitive to such charges, whether we admit it or not. Moral relativists, nihilists, anti-American agitators at home and abroad, taking advantage of this state of moral confusion, believe that the mere accusation of hypocrisy ought to be enough to halt all action, perhaps even to suspend or pre-empt reality. And it is a mark of the extent of this moral confusion that the utterance of this magic word can often come very close to inducing the intended paralysis. So sensitive have we become to the accusation of hypocrisy, and so eager to avoid it, so accustomed to weighing moral imperatives and courses of action against each other, that the failure to decide between them is almost felt to be a sort of self-justifying virtue in its own right.���� ��
It's tempting (and certainly not altogether wrong) to associate this mode of thought with "the Left," but in fact it cuts widely through the collective contemporary American consciousness. It can be discerned in the Kissinger-esque "realism" of the GHW Bush administration, which sought no more than the preservation of an imperfect status quo and and the pursuit of narrow interests rather than wanton indulgence in the "fiction" of noble goals. It was perhaps part of what lay behind the dark hints of a new era of American isolationism and "humility" floated vaguely by the GWB of the electoral campaign; and though 9/11 seems to have dispensed with the isolationism problem for the foreseeable future, the culture of hesitancy and the cult of "I dare not" is still very much with us, through Colin Powell and other veterans of the premature calm after the Desert Storm. Ironically, perhaps, it was also present in some of the Clinton international interventionists, who were only comfortable with military action when they could claim that there was no self-interest involved.
Oops, I seem to have lurched into a lecture of my own when all I meant to do was draw attention to Moira's essay. Read it. It's good. �����
Posted by Dr. Frank at January 4, 2002 03:17 AM | TrackBack