by CKR
Last weekend we saw an angry young man charged with rape flee from the courthouse where he was to be tried, probably killing four people and injuring others in the process. A middle-aged man killed seven fellow church members and wounded four others in Wisconsin. The week before, the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were killed by a man who later killed himself. In that case, a violent white supremacist group was under suspicion until the suicide. A gay young man was beaten almost to death in my city.
Individual problems, violent media, and human weaknesses are involved in all of these and the pettier examples of violence all around us: people speaking harshly to their children in the grocery store, mailboxes smashed with baseball bats, hand gestures by drivers, families and friends no longer able to discuss politics civilly.
Or is there a larger environment that encourages violence? It seems that religion and nationalism are converging in America. That convergence is being used by politicians in ways that encourage violence as a solution.
According to news reports, the Worldwide Church of God, the sect that sustained the murders in Wisconsin, preached nonviolence. Other sects, however, preach otherwise. Abortion is murder, so it is acceptable for adherents to avenge those murders by murdering doctors and harassing women. War against unbelievers is acceptable: “I knew my god was bigger than his god.” The Left Behind series of twelve books describing the “rapture” and “tribulations” are best-sellers. They lavish many pages on the tortures of the damned and rejoicing of the faithful.
This is cloaked in “respect for life,” exemplified by the political scramble over Terry Schiavo, while maimings and killings in Iraq are ignored or written off as necessity.
Car bombs in Iraq kill tens and occasionally hundreds of civilians, improvised explosive devices kill another few soldiers every day. Eventually the carnage turns into a baseline for our experience. The March Harper’s Magazine points out that in earlier wars, only 15-20% of soldiers could force themselves to shoot at the enemy. With training tuned by psychology, that number is now 95%. The soldiers who have been trained in this way return to society, bringing that training with them.
Anatol Lieven examines this violent confluence of religion and nationalism in America Right or Wrong. While recognizing “the American Creed” as a unique, frequently positive, force originating in the American experiment in government, he shows how that creed has combined with religion to produce the messianism of the Iraq war, the idea that democracy must be spread by any and all means.
Lieven is well-qualified to analyze American nationalism. He observed another sort of nationalism in action as the Baltic States removed themselves from the Soviet Union. His book, The Baltic Revolution, is easily the best on the subject. He is not an American citizen, and he did not grow up in America. This is important, because growing up under the influence of the American Creed causes a certain blindness, which Lieven describes well. I have caught myself saying foolish things out of this blindness as I’ve traveled in other countries. Lieven quotes Louis Hartz:
When one’s ultimate values are accepted wherever one turns, the absolute language of self-evidence comes easily enough. This then is the mood of America’s absolutism: the sober faith that its norms are self-evident. It is one of the most powerful absolutisms in the world…
There has always been a religious element to American nationalism. The “city on a hill” would be the goal toward which other nations would strive, and America’s moral might would lead them.
…if the Message is self-evidently true, universal and universally apprehendable, then any failure cannot be due to the Message. It must be due to some failure on the part of the audience…
This sort of reasoning applies to Americans as well as to outsiders. If an American fails to become happy and wealthy, it is his own failure. Such feelings of failure makes the message of American nationalism all the more welcome: if I cannot be this embodiment by myself, then I can partake of the nation’s qualities.
The Protestant church has brought Americans together and soothed their emotional wounds. In frontier towns, it often provided social interactions as well as schooling, as do today’s megachurches for people who perceive the rest of the nation and the world to be as dangerous as anything on the frontier. At the same time, Americans retained what Lieven calls
the traditional European peasant fear and hatred of the state, without being exposed to the dense web of state influences, institutions and benefits which in Europe later diministed this fear[,]
making the church seem the more reliable institution.
A variety of unsavory feelings can be justified by a mixture of religion and nationalism by naming groups of people enemies of the country: hatred of intellectual elites, racism, fear of homosexuality, the belief that a golden age existed at some time in the past (its present location seems to be an idealized 1950s).
Via the neoconservatives and millenarian Christianity, support for Israel has become an essential part of America’s current nationalism. Much of the fearful rhetoric and aggressive military postures disguised as defense are far more appropriate to a small embattled country like Israel than to a large country as militarily and economically strong as the US. The extremely defensive rhetoric that flows from this posture produces fear, and fear leads to a state of mind in which violence becomes easier. Lieven again:
A central feature of nationalism is precisely its ability to feed off a very wide range of other resentments, loyalties, identities, hopes and fears. The sheer breadth of its ability in this respect, together with its quasi-religious ability to offer mortal humans an identity which transcends the short span of their own lives, has helped give nationalisms around the world their decisive edge over socialism.
I first traveled to Estonia in 1998, seven years after its second independence. As I learned the language and culture, I became aware of a strong Estonian nationalism. For example, the word rahvus means people or nation in much the same way the German word volk does, and the word isamaa, evoked in patriotic songs and the names of political parties, means fatherland. The analogies were unsettling and sensitized me to other indications of nationalism. But as I looked, I could see little beyond the words that might be analogous to German hyper-nationalism. Estonians discuss their nationalism with a candor that is not present in America today and eshibit little need to demonize those who disagree. Perhaps that is because the Estonians felt the effects of German hyper-nationalism.
Lieven paves the way for a similarly candid discussion of American nationalism.
To examine their own nationalism in this way, it will however be necessary for Americans to learn from the often terrible example of other nationalism in modern history and around the world. Doing so will require an ability to step outside American national myths and look at the nation with detachment, not as an exceptional city on a hill, but as a mortal nation among other nations, better than most, no doubt, but also subject to the moral hazards, temptations and crimes to which many peoples have been exposed.