In a must-read piece from the 4/16 National Review, (via The Manhattan Institute) John McWhorter discusses what he calls an "attitudinal tic" in America over the last thirty years or so. The growing cadre of "Americans Without Americanness" is a cultural phenomenon that McWhorter fears may only be abated by a sustained attack on America, which would have the potential to snap the emotionally needy out of their "therapeutic alienation", and help recent immigrants come to view America more as an identity, and less as simply an opportunity. Do read it all.
...a cherished observation on a certain circuit is that “America was founded upon racism from its very beginnings,†which regularly cops vigorous applause from white as well as black audience members. There’s some truth to this, to be sure — but in that we cannot change it, the charge implies that it would have been better if Jamestown and Plymouth had never been settled and Africans had remained in their villages. Patriotism, obviously, does not apply here.Posted by dan at April 19, 2007 9:47 PMCertainly one would not expect scholarly people to devote careers to mere celebration. But one might imagine them fashioning a nuanced but vigorous brand of patriotism, calling America on its weaknesses with a basic pride in what we do right. A model would be typical intellectuals in France. Instead, we are taught that the enlightened orientation to our native land ought be more like the one that reigns in Germany, so deeply embarrassed about the Holocaust as to recoil at any prideful view of their Vaterland. The enlightened soul must therefore sneer at such notions as a U.S. policy titled Homeland Security.
The extreme nature of modern leftist academics’ writings suggests that empirical engagement with reality is not the driving force in such ideology. For example, most of this work, while presented as advocacy for the downtrodden, reveals a curious lack of genuine commitment to change. The tacit assumption is that nothing could make America a worthy project short of a seismic transformation in its operating procedures and in the fundamental psychologies of its inhabitants. No reasonable person could have any hope that this could actually happen, and this can only mean that people who think this way maintain their opinions for reasons other than practical ones.
Those reasons are emotional rather than political — a desire to wear alienation from the Establishment as a badge of insight and sophistication. It reaffirms that the wearers are good people, good in a way unavailable to those less learned and aware. This cynicism is calisthenic: It benefits its bearer rather than the people it purports to be concerned about. It is something I have elsewhere termed therapeutic alienation.
Therapeutic alienation is not, however, confined to the ivory tower. Beyond the campus, explicit, acrid contempt for the Establishment is a fringe taste — but the therapeutic alienation at the roots of this contempt is now widespread, and has equally dire consequences for proud American identity. Existential alienation and oppositional sentiment for their own sake have a way of discouraging people from saluting a flag.
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Alienation as performance, to be sure, began the first time an early Homo sapiens child had a tantrum. But under ordinary conditions of human society, this behavior, while more typical of some individuals than others, does not become a zeitgeist. It is treated as an emotional indulgence that real-life exigencies must keep in check. Societies living on the land, ever in fear that weather or warfare will leave them in danger of starvation, do not know of alienation as sport. Modern America, however, is a wealthy society where few are hungry, and where there has not been a war on our own soil in 150 years (and not one that all able-bodied men were required to participate in in 40 years). Under these conditions, the tantrum no longer constitutes a threat to survival. Enter, then, alienation embraced as a cathartic pose.