Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American

Pepe Escobar is a world-traveling journalist who’s worth more than the entire staff at CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, and most of the others in the American mainstream news-media. He seems to often be in the most dangerous regions of our planet and to have lots of solid information and to be able to provide insightful analyses based upon that information. In his essay, Breaking American exceptionalism, he deals with a problem in the American moral character which has unleashed those dangers in many of those regions.

Much of his analysis takes a television show, Breaking Bad, as an allegory for what has happened to the United States: Walter White, a seemingly decent fellow who teaches high-school chemistry has developed a second life as Heisenberg, a drug-dealing gangster. As Escobar puts it:

Walt/Heisenberg is a scientist. His scientific genius was appropriated by unscrupulous partners in the past, who enriched themselves in a tech company. As Heisenberg, finally the scientific/mechanical genius comes to full fruition – from a wheelchair bomb to a raid based on magnets and even a remix of the 1963 Great Train Robbery in the UK, not to mention the perfectly cooked meth.

After making a few comments on various aspects of this double-existence, including a comment about Nietzschean nihilism, Escobar gets to the heart of the matter:

Walter White, once again, embodies “the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Escobar’s analyses apparently come, at least partly, from his contemplations on Studies in Classic American Literature, a study of the American character by DH Lawrence and, in particular, of the Deerslayer character from James Fenimore Cooper’s novels.

I haven’t had a chance to get hold of Lawrence’s book—a few libraries linked to my smalltown library have copies, but this analysis seems close to that of Herman Melville regarding, first, the moral characters and thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and, secondly, his generalization of his fears from that analysis to the typical American. Melville thought the American character to have a strong streak of moral insanity and considered that to be of the form of a rebellion against a God who didn’t give us as good a Creation as we deserve. In Moby Dick, the actions centered around Ahab who was a courageous and more self-honest version of Emerson. In his next novel, The Confidence Man, Melville specifically dealt with the egocentric nature of Emerson (the philosopher who spoke gobbledy-gook) and Thoreau (the practical pupil) and then that of nearly all the passengers on a steam-ship (Americans in general with Cooper perhaps showing up)—the selfishness of these passengers, oddly enough, showed up as a hardheaded and seemingly proper refusal to accept any of the claims of the Confidence Man. Nathaniel Hawthorne had an understanding which was different in details from that of Melville’s but essentially the same. Tocqueville also thought Americans to have had an odd ability to ignore the most brutally obvious facts if they disagreed with mainstream American viewpoints. I’ve also read that Henry James, Sr had similar fears of the exceptional nature of the American character. Escobar didn’t raise this fear but I think this American moral disease to be spreading around the world with American popular culture, though few peoples have moved over to a dreamworld so completely as have the residents of the indispensible country.

In Christian terms, Americans are a people lacking in true charity—the love that binds us into communities as strongly as our dependencies do; Americans practice charity largely as a way of feeling good about themselves. Alternatively, they could feel good about themselves by killing off those “red savages” who were servants of Satan. Update to a people who send off collections of dollar bills to feed the children in one country, perhaps Haiti, even as they send in a firepowerful, if not so competent, military to demolish a city in another country. Don’t children live in such places as Baghdad?

In Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, set in Vietnam in the early 1950s, we read about a clean-cut, young American man who is an undercover CIA agent. He spends his days helping Vietnamese to build businesses, improve their farms, and so on; he spends his evenings providing support to criminal warlords who commit terroristic atrocities against the civilian population of Saigon. Lest you think Greene was imagining this sort of activity, I’ll quote General William Odom, a prominent figure in the Carter and Reagan and Bush I regimes, from American Hegemony: How to Use It, How to Lose It:

Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely make the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

In other writings, Odom has put forth justification of the use of terrorism as a tool of American policy. American leaders, though not of the competent sort, aren’t so fully dumb as they might appear—they know quite well they use gangster methods to secure power and wealth around the world. They have souls which are “hard, isolate, stoic”; they are killers, though perhaps themselves too soft in body or too cowardly in physical ways to go forth into the action.

Life is more complex and more interesting than textbooks or newspapers can communicate, more interesting and less clear-cut than even the most complex of novels or history-books, let alone any movie or play or television show. There are a variety of interesting angles for studying this problem of American “Exceptionalism”.

I’ve discussed this problem from various angles before, including one angle which I consider particularly interesting and insightful. In June of 2009, I published the essay, The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding, in which I claimed:

Those who abstract only by idealizing their particular beliefs and ways of life will remain trapped by their prejudices, country yokels come to the big city and seeing no choices but to give up their ways of life fully or to react against the surrounding confusion by withdrawing into self-righteousness and maybe outright hatred. Only he who learns to abstract up to higher levels can truly see the viewpoint of others and see the goodness in multiple cultures which are in conflict even when he decides that he’s morally bound to side with one. For example, someone might see the goodness in the nomadic life of the New England Indians while deciding that a larger, more settled population is morally preferable to a nomadic society of the few.

Some of the Puritan leaders of New England during the period of King Phillip’s War were very well-read in Newton and all were well-read in the Bible and classical literature and Calvinist theology, yet they proved incapable or unwilling to ascend to a higher level of abstraction during the conflict with King Phillip and the tribes which followed him into war. Staying bound in their own concrete manifestation of Christianity and Western Civilization, they failed to see their position was not one of good and God-centered men fighting against a Satanic enemy but rather that of somewhat good and would-be God-centered men fighting to expand the domain of one manifestation of the Christian West. The enemy wasn’t Satanic but rather barbaric and nomadic. A suitable amount of competent abstract thought on the part of the European settlers of New England would have allowed them to see the true good they were defending but also the good the nomadic Indians were losing. A truer and more just peace might have been obtained even though I doubt the war could have been avoided.

Is it now possible for the West, as a civilization, to achieve greater competence in the abstract thought necessary to understand our complex selves and our complex civilization? We seem about to needlessly destroy our own civilization because of the same sort of self-righteous blindness which led the New England settlers to misunderstand their conflict with King Phillip and his followers. The New England founders dug a rut of sorts and we Americans seem to have traveled that rut in the ensuing three and a half centuries. We’ve even managed to idealize that rut into the path of truth and righteousness.

For now, I have nothing more to add to my public writings on this issue and probably won’t be able to go beyond this sort of an analysis until I’ve made some progress in my project of expanding our stocks of words and concepts for moral, social, political, and other analyses. I’ve discussed this project in a few places and have also done some work in refining the implications of all of this for understanding human history.

As was true in the 1990s when I began writing novels about my disquieting suspicions that we modern men misunderstand the very nature of created being and of our place in the scheme of things, I have had vague, dream-like ideas and vague images about, in this more recent situation, moral spaces in which densities of human beings can pull individuals into increasingly vast populations or even into the equivalents of black-holes, moral spaces in which our imaginations travel strangely curved paths, moral spaces which we can reshape by proper efforts which are responses to the way things are now, and etc. I don’t think we know how to balance our individual and communal selves in our brave, new world. See my freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, for a background discussion of human individual and communal being. And a little more.

In any case, my mind is often working—if only in subconscious regions—on this problem of how to describe and analyze human being and, especially, the moral aspects of our beings. As I discussed in a short essay, Intentionality as the Guide to Philosophical Thinking, I try to be as Newton was in this way:

I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton]

Most Americans would prefer to avoid this by defaulting to an existing `ideal’ which is almost always a generalization which is actually little more than a restatement in abstract and idealistic terms of concrete American thoughts and behaviors and feelings, as I discussed above in the long quote from The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding.

I’ll give one warning about all of this. There are more good critics than good prophets pointing to a plausible future. Nietzsche was one of those good critics; I’m of the opinion that Nietzsche actually did try to return us to the path of virtuous paganism and failed for a variety of reasons that don’t interest me enough to explore. I’ve tried always in my writings, novels and nonfiction works of various lengths, to point toward a better future, a Christian future which might not interest some in this day and age. In the midst of all this modern disorder, I’ve always held and preached a confidence that God is in charge and is telling a story in which the Body of Christ is forming even in this mortal realm, and I’ve done so by considering both Christian revelations and modern empirical knowledge. What I propose is a story in which the United States had a special role to play, as did many large communities in history, and failed to take up that role. Some see suffering in the future for the American people; I see great suffering just because I think it plausible that God will yet force us to take up the role He had given us in His story. Since we have already messed up in many ways, I think we’ll share that role with other peoples, probably the various peoples of the Pacific Rim. We’re not likely to be dominant in any meaningful way, but we’ll see what happens.

The interested reader can browse my active website, Acts of Being, or my inactive website, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. I have made a large volume of writings freely available. These writings, as well as two commercially published books, are described in Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston.