#749 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Wednesday September 13)
Good morning,
We Americans are pretty convinced we are exceptional. I actually buy in to much of that belief, but with a slightly different spin than is presented in the media these days. America is exceptional in the values espoused by our Founders, nurtured and honed through challenges and sacrifices over the years. There are good reasons to find that America is exceptional. Included are these:
We are a nation founded on ideals and struggling to live up to those ideals
We are a nation that had the benefit of a frontier that offered room to expand (complicated, of course, by the encounters with Native Americans)
America has the greatest number of great universities, Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer prize winners and investors
America is the greatest machine of innovation the world has ever known
America values the individual and has a free press, free speech, free assembly and freedom of thought
America aspires to expand the reach of liberty and democracy throughout the world.
These are all reasons America is exceptional. But this doesn’t mean others aren’t accomplished in these and other areas. Let’s note that the claim of exceptionalism is not the exclusive province of America. The myth of exceptionalism (as in “unique,” rather than merely “special”), while critical to the American story, is one that other nations also claim to one degree or another. This is not to denigrate America’s exceptionalism, which is, well, exceptional. But we should acknowledge that love for one’s own country is one of the means by which civilizations, particularly polyglot nations, can remain coherent and sustainable.
Some stories of exceptionalism don’t involve lists of accomplishments, but of some sense of an exceptional founding myth or an inevitable superiority of the nation as a power and/or as a people. These founding myths rarely are true but they offer up a sense of inevitability, immutability, and eternal veracity. The Soviet Union believed it had a superior economic and social system. But it turned out to be exceptional mostly terrible ways.
Today Vladimir Putin claims an exceptionalism of Russia, maintaining an inevitability of Russian superiority, a (mistaken) reading of history that puts Russia above its neighbors and other peoples, and an eternal and unmoving right to dominate other nations and cultures in its sphere of influence.
Salman Rushdie has a warning about exceptionalism:
“A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.”
-- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
The madness that America is perfect and that we must resort to “the good old days” (which we all know were good for some but not all) results in the denial of the real problems we face. This results in failing to pursue that which has made America great—by not shying from our obligations to ourselves, our fellow citizens, and the world—and embracing opportunities to improve.
It is the madness of exceptionalism that infects President Putin and that informs his war in Ukraine. Ukraine already will require decades to rebuild, many of its cities in ruin, its civilization crushed and, if Putin were to have his way, its history obliterated. The myth that Ukraine is just a subset of the Russian state is counter-historical (i.e., a lie). We should be reminded that Putin’s idea of a “greater Russia” includes not only Ukraine but includes much of the former Soviet Union (in particular, but not limited to, Belarus, the Baltics). Devoid of a vibrant economy or healthy society, Russia resorts to the myth of empire. Putin’s madness, fueled by a misreading of history and misinformation of the Russian people, runs the risk of expanding.
Have a great day,
Glenn