A Few Shiny Pebbles

When the main leftist collectivist ideologies were written down and studied, they were not embedded in a country at that time. Versions of them were later put into play in countries, such as with Russia, China under Mao, Camodia under Pol Pot, and with Cuba and Venezuela, but the groundwork and establishment of the infrastructure of the ideology had already been argued, clarified and/or made more complex. These versions had developed the sidetracks and idiosyncratic superstructural modifications that appeared when the versions of the ideologies were brought into real countries to become physical realities. In short, everyone knows that communism and socialism and other collectivist “isms” are ideologies, and that their incarnation in a real country is an attempt to put that ideological version into play.

That’s why some people argue that communism has never really been tried in the right circumstances, or some other rationalization of why it doesn’t work when tested in reality. But it’s also why such ideologies are studied as philosophies, why their theoretical “pure” form is developed outside of the rigors of actual reality, why any in reality problems are rationalized, and why their ideas have grown an international following of true believers. The Leftist Collectivist Ideologies are Utopian visions, viewed as historical eventualities. To their true believers they carry the infallibility and imprimatur of both science and religion.

Dennis Prager interviewed the author of a new book on his talk radio program. The book, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion, by David Gelernter, says that Americanism is a religion. Now, I believe that the more explorations we make about what America is the better. I can’t wait to get Gelernter’s book and read it. One of the things I want to see is where we agree and disagree, but I know that Gelernter is highly intelligent and extremely interesting and I expect to agree with most of what he says, especially after reading the comments on his book on the Amazon listing. But I need to say this:

In my blog so far I have written of utopian collectivist ideologies, of the Left and the Islamofascists, both of which deal with people and societies in terms of groups and a central leadership that controls every aspect of existence (hence “collectivist”). I think that the utopian ideologies are religions and we may as well say it, because they act as though they are the ultimate perfect societies and are inevitable by historical drives. They speak of changing humans into angels or into perfect members of the social order, of removing all the things in human nature that keep people from behaving perfectly. (They also often claim to be scientifically proved or provable or even provable beyond science.) The Leftist Collectivist Ideologies, such as Marxism or Maoism, for example, are teleological and claim historical inevitability and a “religious” infallibility. The Theological Collectivist Ideologies, such as Islamofascism, are already self-identified as society-controlling infallible religions, with all that implies.

But America’s ideology is non-Utopian. It talks of the shining city on the hill, but it does not claim to produce perfection, or to be historically inevitable, nor does it claim to be a science. It wasn’t a physical inevitability, although it encapsulates most of the dreams of those who were or are subjugated and who wished to be free. It is individualistic in scope. It is more like a technology or a craftsman’s design for a practical machine or utility or body of techniques. It doesn’t claim it’s a utopia, just a specially designed machine producing prosperity, freedom, and individualism when used the right way. It acknowledges that people are different and will wish to live lives that bring them individual meaning.

It does not speak of equality of results. It works best at creating what is variously known as the Middle Class, or the Bourgeoisie, and it also produces a significant number of people who become extremely wealthy. Because individualism and freedom are fundamental values, some people will be living on the fringes of society, with values and a way of life allowed by America but out of the norm, and some people will need help to survive, because they are disabled in some way and cannot follow the normal methods of achieving a meaningful life. However, if the “American ideological technology” is allowed to operate efficiently, the society will thrive, and be strong enough and rich enough to be able to help the people who have trouble in an individualistic society.

The individualism of the outcome is determined by each individual who goes through the process, so people will have different meaning in their lives. This is not a “cookie-cutter” process. The “cookie-cutter” model belongs to the collectivist apparatus, which dictates the shape of everyone not in the small leadership group. In collectivisms, the members of the leadership always have a different lifestyle than, and benefits that are forbidden to, the rest of the collective. In a collectivism, “the people” are modular and interchangeable. Their identity is that of the group. In the Islamofascist collective, this modularity can is actually visible in the way women are treated, with their individualism literally erased by the clothing they are forced to wear and the activities that limit their behavior. Under the Taliban Sharia Law, women were not allowed to learn to read, to be employed, the leave their house alone, to sing, to be recognizable outside their home, and so on.

This is why I think it is important to think of America as a groups of ideas and methods. It is heavily involved with Judeo-Christian values and practices, but it is not itself a religion. (Although, as I said, Gelernter’s book will add valuable insight into America, and there is plenty of room for different facets of the whole.)

But I think one of the most important things about America as an ideology is that much of what it is and can be has been overlooked because it did not exist as a written ideology before it became incarnated in a physical country. America could easily have arrived as a written ideology that never found a possibility for incarnation, in which case I believe it would have been studied more and it may have then become nearer to a religion, nearer to a utopian vision. The fact that it was created and embedded into a real country at the same moment made it immediately subject to the problems involved with reality.

We were incredibly lucky that this simultaneity of creation of America and of the United States happened. We Americans reap the benefits of its incredible ideological success. However, there was a price to be paid for that miracle of simultaneous creation. It means that the history of the United States got mixed up with the history of America, and in a free society, where people can freely carry out anti-American acts and write, speak, and teach anti-American views, that mixture is complicated. (This isn’t as much of a problem in full-fledged collectives, where laws forbid anti-collective—or any proAmerican, for instance—acts or writing. The Islamofascists execute or cut off people’s heads, or murder in some other form, when people disagree or act in ways other than approved of by the Jihadists. In the old Soviet Union, a sentence criticizing Stalin, in a letter sent by Solzhenitsyn to a friend, got Solzhenitsyn sent to a gulag for years. This is why collectivists outlaw writing or media of any kind that might present a differing view. That’s why samizdat, secretly handwritten or copied material, was so dangerous.)

This simultaneity of being a philosophy embedded in a real country created something else that is special. When Communism is tried, and it fails, its followers rationalize it with it being tried “in the wrong place”. America, however, succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its creating forefathers. There is no problem with whether American Ideology would succeed—it did. People risk their lives to leave Communist countries. People have always risked their lives to enter America.

This openness in America makes it hard to recognize America’s unique ideological infrastructure, especially when the discussion comes down to people separating out some aspects of America that are “pro-American” and other aspects of America that are “anti-American”. This also leads to arguments that are incredibly complicated as the writer gets enmeshed in keeping track of the conflicts he or she has inadvertently created by conflating the United States with America.

Here is a great example of what I mean when I say that the way it is argued about now, as though there are two Americas, and that that is the separation, rather than the way I separate it. See how complex arguments become. The cover story of the July 19, 1993, National Review, by John Gray, “The Left's last utopia”, 3078 words long, said, in part (here is just part of the article):

[. . .]

IN AMERICA, of course, the decades of postwar hegemony were a period--especially from the early Sixties onward--of an indigenous anti-Americanism at least as virulent as any abroad. Indeed it is tempting to speculate that, in the obsessional intensity of its self-loathing, American anti-Americanism, particularly during and after the Vietnam War, provided a model for anti-Americanism throughout the world, and most obviously for that in Europe. For it was in these years that anti-Americanism acquired its most radical form—as an attack, not just on the policies and institutions that happened then to prevail in the United States, but on the values and way of life most definitive of America itself. For the Sixties radicals, these were individualism and capitalism. For them and their European counterparts, America embodied modernity in its most extreme and threatening form—a culture founded on experimentation and novelty, unencumbered by tradition or history, in which both communal life and individual identity had to be constantly reinvented. It can even be said that America showed the threatening face of modernity to these radicals in what they saw as its pervasive anomie—in the felt lack of any common or authoritative meaning of life itself. Whether they knew it or not--and some undoubtedly did—the radical critics of America were critics of the modem age of which America is the most unequivocal exemplar.

[. . .]

The risks of modernity--which evoke the anti-Americanism of foreigners--are real enough. Decoupled from tradition and history and from any genuine transcendental faith, with inherited religious traditions having succumbed to the Pelagian heresy of the indefinite improvability of the human lot, modern man is defenseless when faced by the myriad political religions, projects of social engineering, and psychotherapeutic technologies that promise an exorcism of tragedy from human life. It is this spiritual emptiness from which the Enlightenment project--that is to say, the liberal project--emerges and which it aspires to cure. But a politics that promises to exorcise tragedy from history and to foster a new kind of human being is bound to bump up against such obstacles as traditional ways of living, cultural affinities, national loyalties, religious attachments, and so on.

Not a Nation but an Idea

IN THE case of American liberalism, this mode of politics has a conception of America as being not a nation like any other, having an identity grounded in the contingencies of language and cultural affinity, but an ideological construction whose identity derives from universalist principles, notably civil liberty and human equality. For the liberal, America is not a nation but a civil religion ("an idea"), and loyalty to it is a matter not of sentiment but of ideological commitment. But of course America is also--and first and foremost--a nation existing in history, with an unavoidable legacy of particular traditions, institutions, common ways of thinking and speaking. The actual nation is bound to clash with the civil religion from time to time. And given the tendency of American culture, noted by Mr. Hollander, to veer between idealistic optimism and anger when the idealism is thwarted, it was only to be expected that attachment to America as a civil religion should come to express itself as hatred of the values and institutions that are most definitive of America as a historic nationality.

Hence the litmus test of liberalism in America today is the commitment to multiculturalism, with its concomitant delegitimation of all that remains of a common national culture. This liberal rejection of the very idea of a common culture as being itself repressive goes with the interpretation of the United States as being, not a nationality like others in the world, but a universal nation. This oxymoronic conception, endorsed not only by liberals but by many others, including prominent neoconservatives and libertarians, expresses the conviction that the United States is unique, the first of its kind, and the precursor of a new universal civilization.

[…]

The liberal project of destroying a common national culture in America, and so of hyphenating American national identity, has been under way for some time, and has already had consequences that are probably irreversible. It has not, of course, diminished ethnic conflict-America must now be the most ethnically obsessed and divided of any of the world's liberal democracies—but it has further Balkanized American political life into a contest between ethnic and other special-interest groups for group rights and similar legal privileges. Is it still a real option for America to reassert its identity as an historic nation having a common culture? Or has that option already been closed by liberal multiculturalism? These questions can be put in another way. Can America now do without the liberal civil religion of universal nationhood, when the particular content of its historic national identity has been largely drained away or at least discredited in acceptable political discourse as "nativism" or "racism"? And what does history—that ghost at the feast of liberal ideology--suggest about the fate of a state whose civil religion is based on denying the necessity of a common national culture?

Surely this is unnecessarily complicated, both because it puts elements of two different ideologies into the same category while separating others of the same ideology, but also because it is so often wrong-headed about American ideology. For example, Gray states that “America must now be the most ethnically obsessed and divided of any of the world's liberal democracies” whereas I say that it is the United States that is divided. America has never lost its belief in a common national culture, celebrating the ideology of America itself.

Because clarity is so important to any attempt at understanding a complicated issue, I choose to view the breakdown in this different way. This is why I repeat so many times that America is the ideology that was brought out of the abstract and set into Reality in the country of the United States. To say anti-American aspects of the argument belong only to the United States, and pro-American aspects belong only to America, allows a clear discussion of the issues. These aspects have all been mixed throughout the history of our country because all ideas, pro-American and anti-American, have to be incarnated through the living human beings that carry them out, consciously or subconsciously. There are people who carry anti-American ideas into being and people who carry pro-American ideas into reality. This way, the history of the physical incarnation of the ideology America, that got rid of slavery and that passed women’s suffrage, for instance, can be seen in context and as different from the history of the physical country of the United States, which had Jim Crow laws and fought the American ideals of human beings being created equal and universal suffrage.

People who support the individualistic ideology of America do some things to support America, and people who support collectivist ideologies, such as those of the Left and that of the theocratic Islamofascists do other things to try to defeat ideological America and create a Leftist United States or an Islamofascist United States.

I believe that this separation will be tremendously helpful in any investigation of what has gone wrong with our country, America, and what we can do to get it back.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, The Virtuous Republic, The Random Yak, guerrilla radio, DeMediacratic Nation, Right Truth, Webloggin, Stuck On Stupid, Cao's Blog, The Amboy Times, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, Adeline and Hazel, Pursuing Holiness, Allie Is Wired, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, CommonSenseAmerica, CORSARI D'ITALIA, High Desert Wanderer, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.