Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace. Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can–to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.” Ultimately, Americanism is derived from the Bible [bold mine-DL]. The Bible itself has been a grand unifying force in American society, uniting Christians of many creeds from Eastern Orthodox to Unitarian, and Jews, and Bible-respecting deists like Thomas Jefferson–and many others who respect and honor the Bible whatever their own religious beliefs. ~David Gelernter
Simply ridiculous. What can I say? Do Jews respect the Septuagint? Are they unified behind the New Testament? Jefferson “respected” the Bible the way that a butcher “respects” the carcass of an animal–he chopped up the New Testament and kept the bits of the Gospels that he thought were suitably “rational,” which leads me to note that my WWTW colleague Paul Cella has a good post on Gelernter’s latest. Paul’s Marcion reference is very good, since Gelernter is a modern gnostic of sorts, and the reference to Marcion makes the comparison with Jefferson only too obvious. If Marcionites, too, might be counted in the broad church of ”Bible-respecting” folk, we can see just how utterly meaningless such respect is.
Gelernter’s article is something amazing to behold. It combines almost every hateful aspect of nationalism and every piece of degraded thinking shared by war supporters today. It blithely confuses opponents of particular wars with adherents of doctrinaire pacifism, a view that virtually no one in this country holds today. Anyone who opposes the war in Iraq knows all too well how idiotic it is to try to describe the leadership of the modern Democratic Party as pacifistic. If they were, they might at least have the stomach to try to end this war outright, and, of course, they do not. Gelernter sets a new standard for unintentional irony by damning globalism in the pages of The Weekly Standard, a flagship of globaloney if ever there was one. There is, of course, the required mockery of France and the obligatory nod to Joe Lieberman, and every other intellectually lazy rhetorical move that we have come to expect from neoconservatives. It is really quite dreadful.
Consider this bit of Gelernter’s “reasoning”:
You might argue that World War II has nothing to do with Iraq; after all, the Japanese started the fight by attacking our fleet at Pearl Harbor. But even the Japanese never succeeded in slaughtering civilians on the U.S. mainland. And those who think that our war in Iraq has nothing to do with the 9/11 murderers, or their friends whose ultimate target is America, are living in Fantasyland.
Actually, one might argue that WWII has nothing to do with Iraq because WWII ended over sixty years ago and was fought in entirely different parts of the world against radically different enemies. As for living in a fantasy, I expect that Gelernter would know all about that by now.
This is really a shame. Some years ago I heard good things about Gelernter’s Drawing Life (perhaps I heard incorrectly?), and I imagined that because of his personal experience he would have to have been keenly aware of the dangers of ideological fanaticism and the glorification of violence as a means of change. Apparently he has come to different conclusions.
Gelernter’s article is just a rehashed version of his new book’s thesis as applied to the latest political controversy, in this case the fight over Petraeus’ testimony. It confirms my impression that Gelernter’s book does not simply try to describe the idea of “Americanism.” A description and analysis of the idea might not indicate any approval of the thing being described. He might have written a book about Americanism describing the “Americanist heresy” and could have been quite hostile to it, but, of course, this is David Gelernter we’re talking about. Far from opposing the heresy, he seems interested in becoming its latest heresiarch. He is interested in championing his brand of Americanism quite actively, even if that means grossly distorting or oversimplifying American history, among other things, in the process. It also seems to mean extolling the virtues of every military conflict of the last century, going out of his way to defend the merits of the most astonishingly futile of wars. He manages to find words of praise for British intervention in WWI (!), which even one so belligerent as Niall Ferguson was sane enough to recognise as an unparalleled national disaster for Britain. Perhaps if more leaders in 1914 had belonged to the mythical church of appeasement that Gelernter has invented in this latest exercise in lame, shabby Europe-bashing, European civilisation would not have come crashing down in an orgy of bloodshed–not that I expect him to care about the fate of European civilisation, since he seems to loathe Europeans so intensely.
From the book description of Americanism:
If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.
Conflating one’s country with nationalist ideology is bad enough, but to imagine that your ideological nation is itself the font of a “religion,” and that Americanism is ”derived from the Bible” at that, is so perverse that words fail me.
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September 18th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Grumpy Old Man
For once in my life I beat Daniel to the punch in debunking Gelertner’s poisonous pabulum. I’m gloating because it’s not likely to happen again.
I’m told G’s quite an important computer scientist, a victim of the Unabomber, and an observant Jew. These facts only serve to make his venture into American creedalism more infelicitious.
The various religious groups described don’t agree on what books make up the Bible, let alone what it means. Read Ben Sirach lately, Rev. Robertson? How G. manages to derive “equality” and “democracy” from any plausible reading of the Bible is so far beyond me that I won’t try to refute the notion.
As for the Bible and “Americanism,” even Americans who purport to revere the Bible have very little idea of what’s in it.
September 18th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
James Kabala
Anthony Esolen (like you, always worth reading even when mistaken) has a very different take on the Gelernter article here:
http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2007/09/i-love-thy-rock.html
September 18th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Grumpy Old Man
As Esolen says, Gelertner’s not so bad on the follies of left-liberal internationalism and pacifism. Where he goes off the rails is his view of America as essentially creedal, and his advocacy of the universal dissemination of this creed. That opening lets Wilsonian madness creep in.
September 18th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Daniel Larison
Mr. Esolen’s thoughts are mostly very good, though I don’t think we will fully agree on Gelernter’s application of his thesis in this case, but he and I do appear to be mostly on the same page when it comes to understanding patriotism. (I might quibble with him over the Peter the Great point as well.) This is why it strikes me as very odd that he would regard the Gelernter article as “superb,” since it seems clear as day to me that the Americanism Gelernter promotes is the antithesis of the patriotism Mr. Esolen espouses. Mr. Esolen is trying here to promote the real country to which people owe loyalty; Gelernter is promoting a fiction invented for the concentration and projection of power.
I would, however, question the idea that patriotism is all that contingent on our attitude towards the rest of the world. He said:
“But if you cannot imagine saying, even in matters of no ultimate moral import, “I don’t care if the rest of the world does it, the rest of the world is wrong, the rest of the world can go to hell,” then you are no patriot.”
There may be occasions when it is necessary to say something like that (though there is really no reason why love of one’s country should entail telling other nations to go to hell, unless they are attacking your country), but I think it is a mistake to premise patriotism on responses to attitudes in the rest of the world, whether they are negative or positive. The first part of the statement, “I don’t care,” is where it could stop and the point would be made. The rest of the world could only be “wrong” if the issue was one of moral import. In matters of custom and fashion, the rest of the world usually cannot be “wrong.”
Likewise, whether or not other peoples around the world like us or dislike us should be irrelevant to our attachment to our country, and how they do things in Europe or elswhere is interesting but obviously not binding on us (nor are our ways binding on them). Similarly, our way of life is our own and we have our own reasons for valuing it and preserving it, and it does not matter whether the rest of the world follows suit or not. In a sense, we should be almost indifferent to the customs of other peoples. Live and let live. The “internationalism” Esolen criticises is a busybody, intrusive sort, and the Americanism Gelernter describes is the same. Esolen wants to be left in peace to mind his own business–well and good. Gelernter wants to meddle in the affairs of every other people on earth, just as the left “internationalists” would have for all of us. The differences between Esolen and Gelernter seem vast, so how can he say the article is “superb”?
A respectful distance from other nations better suits patriotism, but not a distance so vast that it precludes learning and exchange. Once patriots become embittered against the world, they tend to turn aggressive and begin defining their loyalties not by what they love and by what they are but instead by what they reject and what they are not. Gelernter’s Americanism seems filled with aggression and defines American-ness in militant opposition to much of the rest of the world. The business about America-as-religion is just crazy icing on the cake. I don’t see how Mr. Esolen could share Gelernter’s views and write the post that he did.
The entire debate is confused by these terms internationalist and/or globalist and Americanist. Internationalists and globalists are not actually more interested in other nations and other ways of life–they see global, international institutions as a vehicle for power, and they favour all those things that tend towards the homogenisation of all nations to one dreary, servile standard. Globalists are not even really internationalists properly speaking, since internationalism presupposes the continued existence of nations–globalists would like the world to be without nations, or as close to this state as possible. Americanists of Gelernter’s stripe at least are not necessarily interested in the existing America, but see it as something to be exploited to advance their global agenda.
That is what is so bizarre about this Americanism–it is global in its claims and ambitions (”a global religion”), and it uses our history simply as a springboard to propel itself into the world. It is no less “internationalist,” or rather globalist, except that it prefers that power remain vested in national institutions. The debate here between Gelernter and the “internationalists” is over the difference between global hegemony run from Washington and globalism in which other powers also play a significant role. Both are certainly deplorable, but the former is much more dangerous because it is can still make a powerful nationalist appeal (through its use of rhetoric about exceptionalism and national mission, etc.) and can exploit natural patriotic resentments against transnational elites (whose detachment from and hostility to natural loyalties offends patriots). Every time a patriot falls for Americanist/hegemonist rhetoric, a different more virulent kind of globalism has been empowered.
Add to all this that Gelernter’s article takes as its basic assumption that desiring withdrawal from Iraq has something to do with pacifism, and it is anything but “superb.”
September 18th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Carter
There is at least one famous statesman with views similar to Gelernter:
“America is not only for the whites , but it is for all. Who is the America? The American is you, me and that. When we go to America we will become Americans and there is no a race or nationalism called America and the Americans are those Africans, Indians, Chinese, and Europeans and whoever goes to America will become American…American is for all of us and the whole world had made and created America. All the people all over the world had made America and it shall accordingly be for all of us. I will never feel ashamed when I claim for my right in America and it will not be strange when I raise my voice in America.” - Col. Moammar Gadhafi
September 18th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
empiricus
@GOM -
I strongly suspect that I am the only Eunomia reader-responder (other than perhaps Mencius Moldbug if he still reads here) to have ever actually written parallel processing code in Linda, the development of which is AFAICT Gelernter’s main claim to fame in CompSci (the Linda language never made it out of the university; only CS grad students and DoD researchers like me ever used it to my knowledge).
Back in the day when I cared about such things, I was fairly unimpressed with Gelernter as a computer scientist, but I certainly considered him as deserving of recognition as a Real Computer Scientist as anyone else, and more than many who got more funding. A borderline case for the “quite important” qualification, I guess.
Dr. Gelernter is unquestionably a victim of the Unabomber (though he’s also an example of someone trying to derive additional moral authority from his victimhood), and AFAIK he is indeed Conservative observant, but why do you think his standing in CompSci, whatever that standing might be, makes his garbage any more infelicitous than it would be if e.g. he’d been a noname professor of accounting who got maimed by Kaczynski?
September 20th, 2007 at 7:43 am
Roach
Let’s speak plainly. For Jewish Americans like Elernter, their America began in the 1890s. And it was a storied place, a refuge from the allegedly irrational anti-semitism of Tsarist Russia. It was the land of opportunity, not least because it was polyglot in religions and ethnicity.
But this America was also an ethno-religious land of white Christians. It had a great deal of prejudice and identity. Jews still stood out. And it was the land of free markets and capitalism combined with an austere morality. In the business field some Jews excelled and fit in quite nicely (particularly German Jews), but others (often their sons and the Russian Stetl Jews) resented and rebelled against. The tension of this new community and the natives many Jews fear their lot would be the same as it was in Europe. And they reached for the same solutions: radicalism, control of the instruments of culture, accumulation of welath, domination of the professions, etc.
So for this group the real heroes of America are its universalists who preached a vision of America in which the Jews would not stand out: Abraham Lincoln prioritizing the natural moral law above the rigors of positive law. And FDR who led a grand crusade to save Europe and externalize our concern for good government at home to securing democracy for the whole world. And the Jewish left also praise its radicals; the John Browns, Wobblies, and all the rest. And why? Because these folks move us from being a European style “Fatherland” to a more abstract nation in which all can join in equally, especially the Jews.
This America–the rationalist ideological version that later combined with a highly self-critical version of the dark ethnocentric past–is the America they live in. It started later, only with the arrival of the European proletariat, and it has little connection to our Founding, our previously dominant WASP elites, or any recognizable form of the Christian beliefs that suffused American life until the 1950s. It is the promotion of a seemingly neutral account of the past that has little bearing on the actual contours of that past. It’s a blind rewriting of the past for petty ethnic reasons that harm the confidence and patrimony of the former elite. This is pretty much Slezkine’s thesis too in The Jewish Century, but he looks not just at the rise of a superficially meritocratic rationalist ideological state in the US but also Russia.