In The Liberal Mind Kenneth Minogue, the British political theorist, tells us:
“Need” belongs to a particular language of political and moral thought arising from the conception of generic men. Once we have entered into that language, we can only say individualist things. It is a language which has grown out of the liberal movement ( and some associated movements) and it has, like all languages, its particular blind spots, the things which it cannot say. Once inside, no matter how much we thresh about, we shall be hard put to it to escape. A great mistake has been to imagine that an ideology consists of a set of answers to neutral questions; whereas in fact, it consists in the questions.
In a strong biological sense, I do need food, clothing, a warm place to work, a comfortable bed in a warm room. Some of this could be partially given up at the cost of health, physical and emotional and mental, but I’m not volunteering to lead an ascetic life.
I’m left with that confession that I need food and shelter and clothing, in common with those who are driven to eat out multiple times a week and those who desire houses with a thousand square feet per inhabitant. I need some entertainment and some stimulation, in common with those who think the Beatles were the equal of Mozart and those who act as if the availability of new audio or video technology will inevitably lead to some sort of worthy esthetic feats. I need a sense of belonging, of membership in a substantial body of my fellow human beings, in common with those who imagine recent American presidents to be more than political gangsters of the sort drawn to powerful, centralized governments. I need a way to worship my Creator, in common with those who honor Christian leaders who pander to power rather than speaking truth to power. I need some peace and order in the streets, in common with those who support the destruction of civil and political rights in the interest of promises of safety and security.
We have an ideologically formed language of needs which is only partially determined by our biological needs and which helps shape both the modern nation-state, the welfare-warfare state, and its citizens.
Which questions do we ask so that we think the answers offered by the modern nation-state seems normal and inherently desirable?
The questions being asked in the United States since World War II seem to lead to answers involving movies about cannibalistic psychiatrists and to concerts starring 70 year-old men still singing about adolescent angst. They seem to lead to answers involving gigantic sports stadiums and a surprising number of young men who are well over six feet tall and weigh more than 250 pounds while being as agile as 180 pound athletes of an earlier age. The questions being asked seem to lead to answers involving a huge number of American military bases throughout Asia and Africa and Latin America and the replacement of American citizen-soldiers by Rambo. The questions seem to lead to answers involving the strip-searching of elderly ladies in American airports and the acceptance of the mass-murder of men and women and children in Waco because their leader was said to be a nut.
When I find a good insight or a great way of expressing an insight I’d already imbibed, I tend to repeat it for a while. I apologize if it’s annoying to any of my regular readers, but… In The Quiet American, Graham Greene said that we Americans feel the world exists to give us opportunities to feel good about ourselves. And so I claim:
The main question Americans, and far too many other modern human beings, propose to the world is: What can you offer to make me feel good about myself?
We Americans have become hollow-chested human beings in the words of C.S. Lewis or genial creatures lacking any true moral character in the words of Adam Smith. We seek to feel good about ourselves rather than to be good men by objective standards, whether those of virtuous paganism or of Christianity.
We have deformed our own minds or souls, our moral characters, by the strategy, workable for only a short while, of forcing the world to seem to be something it isn’t, something which gives back feel-good answers to that question: What can you offer to make me feel good about myself? We are paying a big price, Americans and others in the West, as the world is revealing itself to something different from what we assume it to be. The world isn’t something to be shaped to our desires but rather something to which we should should respond, thus shaping ourselves to that world, that is, shaping ourselves in response to those manifested thoughts of our Creator. In a simplistic phrase: we should seek to be good rather than to feel good about ourselves. There is a world of difference.