It’s time to kick the arrogance of ‘American exceptionalism’ to curb

By David McElroy · September 24, 2011

For some people, Americans are best represented by a hero such as Captain America. For others, we’re best represented by a doofus such as Homer Simpson. The truth is somewhere in between.

It’s self-evident to me that people are pretty much the same all over the world. Some are good. Some are bad. Most are in between. Some cultures are sicker than others — and I wonder frequently about ours — but you can’t really say that one is better than the rest.

That’s right. “American exceptionalism” is pure fiction today, even if there might have been a bit of truth when Alexis de Tocqueville dreamed up the concept in the early 19th century. His idea — that America was somehow different and better than any other country ever before — led to the imperial idea of Manifest Destiny and gave generations of Americans the dangerous fairy tale that they were superior to everyone else. (It’s interesting to note that the phrase “American exceptionalism” was coined by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a derisive term.)

This ingrained cultural arrogance has led to the U.S. government spending the last hundred years (and more) running around the world hypocritically telling other people how to run their affairs — and backing up the “advice” with guns. When Ron Paul recently tried to explain that to people in a Republican presidential debate, he was booed and Rick Santorum jumped in to offer the conventional wisdom:

“We are not being attacked, and we were not attacked, because of our actions. We were attacked … because we have a civilization that is antithetical to the civilization of the Jihadists. And they want to kill us because of who we are and what we stand for, and we stand for American exceptionalism, we stand for freedom and opportunity for everybody around the world.”

Paul corrected Santorum:

“As long as this country follows that idea, we’re going to be under a lot of danger. This idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this and they’re attacking us because we’re free and prosperous, that is just not true. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda have been explicit, and they wrote and said that ‘we attacked America because you had bases on our holy land in Saudi Arabia, you do not give Palestinians a fair treatment, and you have been bombing…at the same time you have been bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for ten years….’”

It’s arrogance to pretend that U.S. government actions haven’t laid the groundwork for what has gone on in the last 10 years. When we see our country being attacked, the natural question is why it’s happening. The truth is exactly what Paul outlined. But there’s one thing that keeps neoconservatives from seeing this. They have an ingrained belief in American exceptionalism, so they invent the absurd fiction that the Muslims simply decided to hate us because “we stand for freedom and opportunity.”

The Americans who have died in terror attacks didn’t deserve it in any way. The people responsible for the attacks were the people who carried out those attacks. They bear direct responsibility, and they should. What they’ve done is evil. But they wouldn’t hate us if it weren’t for things that the government claiming to speak in our names has been doing to their people for decades. The majority in this country allowed the government to do things in their name which they didn’t understand — and they didn’t understand the enemies they were making by allowing it.

In a very different context, I quoted linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky earlier this week as saying, “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.” When Ron Paul tells the hard, cold facts about why many in the Muslim and Arab worlds hate us, he’s telling the truth, but the blind people who don’t know the facts think he sounds like an alien.

The arrogance of American exceptionalism is what keeps some people blinded to understanding the truth about history and about what’s going on today. It’s time to ditch this irrational and unreasonable idea. Many Americans are decent and honorable people, but that’s true of people from all other nations and cultures. Most people want to be left alone. It’s easier to understand that if we haven’t swallowed the lie that we’re better than everybody else.

I love the place where I live. It’s my home. It might not be home forever, but it’s been a nice place to live and grow up. But it’s not really any different from any other place on Earth. It’s a place with all sorts of people — good and bad, brilliant and stupid, kind-hearted and mean. We need to mind our own business and let other nations do the same — or we’re going to keep making enemies who will want to attack us in whatever way they can.

It’s time to retire the absurd notion of American exceptionalism. Let’s just be Americans, not people who teach children that we’re somehow elevated above everyone else.

Share on Social Networks

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Related Posts