How else can you interpret an article with the title, The Origins of America’s Unique and Spectacular Cruelty. We are unique! We are spectacular! We are #1!
Unfortunately, we seem to be specializing in all the wrong things.
But by now, American cruelty is both legendary — and one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. Just why would people in a rich country leave their neighbours to die for a lack of basic medicine, their young without good jobs or retirements, make their elderly work until their dying day, cripple students with lifelong debt, charge new mothers half of average income just to have a baby — not to mention shrug when their kids begin massacring each other at school? What motivates the kind of spectacular, unique, unimaginable, and gruesome cruelty that we see in America, which exists nowhere else in the world?
I can agree that the cruelty of our culture is obvious and manifested everywhere, but I hate to deflate our sense of exceptionalism, but we aren’t alone. Look at what Israel is doing to Palestinians, how the United Kingdom and other European states are responding to immigration, how every human society reacts to the Other, how even a civilized nation like Germany could be stirred up by a demagogue to willingly commit atrocities, how Belgium afflicted criminal abuse on the people of the Congo. Our difference seems to be our willingness to perpetrate these torments on ourselves.
The author’s speculation about what causes us to be so horrible tends to fall flat, unfortunately.
My answer goes something like this. Americans, you must remember, grew up in the shadow of endless war. With two “sides” who championed atomic individualism, lionized competition and brutality, and despised weakness and fragility. And thus, America forgot — or maybe never evolved — the notion of a public interest. Each man for himself, everyone against everyone himself. So all there is left in America is extreme capitalism now. Few championed a more balanced, saner, healthier way of life, about a common good, about virtue, about a higher purpose. And in that way, America has become something like, ironically enough, a mirror image of its great enemy, the Soviet Union. It is a totalist society, run by and for one end — only a slightly different one: money.
I disagree. I was born in the 1950s and grew up in this archetypical American society, and it’s not true that we “grew up in the shadow of endless war”, unless you take “shadow” literally. We didn’t experience war. Wars were something that happened elsewhere, to which we supplied cannon fodder. Wars were not something we suffered under, and while there was the ominous terror of nuclear war, we were also blithely confident that we’d win, no matter what. Wolverines! The American character was one of irrational optimism. The history we were taught was all about Manifest Destiny, the near-divinity of the Founding Fathers, our role as the Leaders of the Free World. We are always the winners, and the losers are always the worst people who fully deserved their fate.
The extreme capitalism part I agree with. To me, the best interpretation of the American spirit in literature is personified by Milo Minderbinder in Heller’s Catch 22: irrepressibly cheerful, blind to the harm he does to others, willing to bomb his friends if it increases the value of his shares, and relentlessly sailing through a war that is nothing but a business opportunity to him. We are a people untouched by fear and unable to imagine the consequences.
The rest of the world has good reason to be terrified. Their only consolation ought to be that we’re probably going to wreck ourselves before we can exercise our full capacity for destruction on others.
Well the rest of us can hope you don’t destroy yourselves, but that if you do you do it before destroying the rest of us.
It is manifestly untrue that the US never developed a sense of the public interest. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a massive and runaway success in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
What this author is seeing is the results of the Neoliberal agenda from the late 70s to the present day. Itself a mirror of the “Gilded Age” that led to the Great Depression and a backlash by the capitalist class against New Deal liberalism (or, as it’s know in the rest of the world, enlightened common sense).
What the US needs to do is REdiscover its sense of public interest. To remember the lessons of its 20th Century history and realise that things can be much better. Or, ideally, to go one stage beyond the New Deal and ensure that the economic inequality that led to where we are today is not an inevitable fact of life and can be undone.
Surely if anyone “grew up in the shadow of the Cold War” it was people like the Germans, who lived on the front line. On both sides of it, even.
In case of nuclear war the US might have become a wasteland, but Germany would have been glass. Every last one of us would have been reduced to ash. The Americans (probably the Russians too) even hid nukes underground on their own side to blow up under advancing enemy forces. https://youtu.be/WCTKcd2Ko98?t=38m41s See that solid orange blob? That’s the Germanies.
And yet we didn’t develop those specific collective derangements, instead developing our own unique blend of neuroses.
You know what contemporary Europe makes me think of? Imagine a “perfect” All-American family. Something like what conservatives hold up as ideal. Nice house, picket fence and such. Everyone is neat and pale and blonde with dazzling perfect smiles. Only, behind the facade, Dad embezzles thousands of dollars from his employers to feed an addiction to snorting coke off of ethnic trans streetwalkers, Mom has a rampaging alcohol problem and routinely contemplates suicide to cope with the void in her existence. Son beats up poor kids and shoplifts and don’t even ask what Daughter does.
Europe’s pretty much that. Under the genteel manners, there’s plenty of crime, bigotry and poverty. There are plenty of problems with police abuse and corruption. They have, in short, the same problems we do.
But, hey, they’re jolly nice on the subway so they can look down at us.
That kind of depends on what time period you consider to be when America grew up–the first hundred years had several wars on US soil. The country kind of formed from a war, and before that it was fighting the people who were already here. After the US was formed there was war in the following decades, war in the decades following those decades, then we warred each other. After all that the wars were basically moved to everywhere else, without an actual invasion of the US in the last hundred years, I guess?
And of course the US has won every war it’s ever participated in, obviously, no I’m pretty sure we won that one, shut up who cares about peace treaties we still won, America number won! (This ties in with the Manifest Divinity etc.)
>> how the United Kingdom and other European states are responding to immigration,
>> To me, the best interpretation of the American spirit in literature is personified by Milo Minderbinder in Heller’s Catch 22: irrepressibly cheerful, blind to the harm he does to others, willing to bomb his friends if it increases the value of his shares, and relentlessly sailing through a war that is nothing but a business opportunity to him.
Like invading Iraq, then moving out, removing Khadaffi and leaving Libya alone, letting ISIS grow, increasing mess in the Middle East that resulted in millions of immigrants going to EUrope? I think you may be right on that @pzmyers :D
@ 4 Susan Montgomery
Well Omar, probably was having a bad day, but until the USA gives up co-pays of prisoners the US is not looking all that good.
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/03/shared-microbial-destiny-2.html
@7 I’m not defending the bad things that happen in the US and yeah, Europe’s not as bad. But the evidence is there to suggest that Europe isn’t in a position to dump smug derision on us. It’s a motes and planks thing. Or, rather, a planks and slightly smaller planks thing.
@ 5 Duth Olec
without an actual invasion of the US in the last hundred years, I guess?
Well, “technically”, I think Japan invaded the USA. Did they not take a couple of islands in Alaska? The seals were probably surprised.
Except even that isn’t unique to America. It is that concept that Bertolt Brecht was criticizing in Mother Courage and her Children, and he was talking about Germany, not America.
I think one of the problems is where we think we are. Since “We won WWII” we have felt like we were are the “Leader Of The Free World” and have acted like we were not always such a benevolent leader but one that “I know best” describes clearly. There is nothing I can see that would make the U.S. voluntarily relinquish our self appointed role as leader and decider of what everyone else does, we are going to have to become just one of the other nations by the normal means history has used with other empires. As the world economy grows ever more inter-related and dependent and the effects of the population and its industrialization push the earths climate toward some new equilibrium for warmer than we have seen in our past the peoples of the world are going to have to make some decisions are we going to work together as equals or are we going to devolve into a state that is similar to the late 19th century but with much more bleak of an outcome..
there is no hope for an enlightened out come as long as the U.S. is seen and sees itself as far superior to everyone else.
I hope I and the rest of us can live through the transition .
uncle frogy
@Susan Montgomery: You seem to be giving us that narrative of “European arrogance” I sometimes hear from Americans. Which is baffling to me, because I don’t actually know anyone who identifies with “Europe” (as opposed to their own country) to the degree that they’d derive self-aggrandizement from comparing “Europe” as a whole to the US. Europeans criticise other EU countries just as much as they do the US. There’s no unified “snooty European” perspective on the US, public opinion differs greatly between countries.
And so when a German accurately points out something the US does poorly, they’re not a hypocrite just because Hungary (or wherever) does it even worse. Hungary’s a sovereign nation, we just happen to be in an alliance.
Okay, I guess that idea of “European” is at the same level as lumping Navajo and Algonquin together as “Indians”. At this distance, I’ll concede that lumping all of you in together isn’t accurate. I shouldn’t wonder that the American Progressives who idolize Europe as some sort of paradise are even worse than I in that regard.
Still, if I just say “Great Britain” I think the bulk of what I say holds up well enough.
Uh…. so you are saying the (smaller) mote is in their eye, while the (larger) plank is in ours. Or maybe you talk like this out of only one side of your mouth….
Anyway, the argument from the sermon, as you must realize, considers the opposite situation. Given that theirs is smaller (however you may brand it), so the reasoning goes, that is why they’re in a position to criticize us for having a larger one. (“Dump smug derision” is merely you making this much more extravagant than it need be.)
This is the most disturbing blog post from PZ I have read.
Planks are still planks and arguing over whose is bigger misses the point (I’m sure there’s a naughty joke in there somewhere). And the plank size is reduced only because the countries that make up Europe like to paper over the problems with a big happy face. And, yes, I think that “smug” definitely works.
I would put the origins of the cruelty of the current USA a lot further back. Like, back before you formed yourselves into a nation, there were the roots of the national neuroses which still plague your country today – the racial politics, the paranoia, the gloomy conviction the end of the world is nigh (if not right now, then soon, surely), and the conviction of American exceptionalism. Oddly enough, they can all be traced back to one particular thing: chattel slavery, as started in the 1600s, and continued through to the 1800s – thus proving something like slavery leaves its scars on EVERY part of a society.
The origins of your current racial politics in slavery are obvious, and not even unique (countless other colonised nations have these same racial politics, tweaked a little for local situations), so I’m not going to go into that. What I will be a bit more explicit about is the other neuroses.
The paranoia and the conviction that “the end of the world is nigh” are actually two aspects of the same thing, and they both have their root in the fact that firstly, black slaves were required to live and serve among their white owners, and were by many accounts, treated in a thoroughly horrific and dehumanising way by them. The problems inherent in dehumanising someone who lives alongside you, who cleans your house, washes your clothes, cooks your food, grows your crops, serves as your body-servant (ladies maid, valet), and raises your children should be reasonably obvious. When you are treating this person as livestock, when you are denying them their rights to humanity at all, when you are breaking up their family and selling their husbands, wives, sons, daughters away from them, there has to be a certain amount of retained knowledge that oh yeah, this is going to come back and bite you in the backside so hard. It would be so easy, after all, for a cook to poison the food they’re serving to you; for the household help to help themselves to things like guns, knives, swords and so on; for the ladies’ maid to “accidentally” tug a bit too hard on the Mistress’s stays, or for the valet to “slip” while shaving the Master. So the paranoia grows out of the fear of being the ones the whole business will rebound on – and pushes people to behaving in even more brutal ways in order to terrorise their slaves into not even thinking of rebellion. Meanwhile, the conviction grows that the water is flowing downhill, and eventually it is going to reach bottom… maybe not this year, maybe not next year… but someday soon, it’s all going to blow up.
American Exceptionalism? Well, that comes out of the constant cognitive dissonance created by living in a series of colonies which purported to be built on the idea of individual liberty, but which were, from the very beginning, built primarily on coerced labour (before the slaves came along, the people supplying it were indentured servitors – white English, Irish and Scottish people who came out and pledged seven years of labour to various landowners in order to pay the costs of their passage; or later, convicts who were sent out as indentured labour, and weren’t permitted to return to the UK until seven years had passed, or until they’d served their sentence). There was always the conflict between those noble ideals of “freedom” and the painful reality that the coerced labour of unwilling workers was absolutely necessary in order to build their “free” society, which only got worse as chattel slavery spread. Out of this grew the conviction that the American colonies had to be a special place, where the normal rules didn’t actually apply. America was the exception to the rule, and has remained thinking of itself as such for the last four centuries.
(In a way, American exceptionalism is correct: your country is unique. You are the last refuge for the style of aristocracy and aristocratic thinking which led to the French Revolution. It’s a bit like the cultural equivalent of a zoo, full of strange and rare creatures which are extinct in their natural habitat).
But yeah… this is a lot of what’s at the root of your myriad cruelties to each other – the long-ignored social and cultural cost of chattel slavery.
Yes, the (ahem) “Greatest Generation” gave us the New Deal and the Great Society… that is, until they discovered that those welfare benefits would also go to brown-skinned people. Then, all those high-minded progressive principles went right out the window and the old folks and their Baby Boomer spawn suddenly discovered the free market and “personal responsibility.” Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Dubbya, Barry, and Trump followed.
@Susan Montgomery:
You’re treading awfully close to Dear Muslima territory. Just because Europe has some issues doesn’t mean they can’t point to what the US is doing wrong. Especially if, as you say, Germans are criticizing the US for what Hungary is doing. That’s like saying a person from New York can’t talk about racism being bad because some places in the deep south are still extremely racist.
There is something particular about America, that I do not see in Israel, the UK or elsewhere in Europe. Usually bigotry is aimed at someone other, someone not Our Kind Of People; but in the US, even Our Kind Of People are treated badly. It is remarkable for example how many white cishet protestant Americans love to be underpaid en uninsured.
Susan Montgomery You needed the Tu quoque to feel good about yourself again, didn’t you?
@Susan Montgomery #16
Oh, really? Give me a break. Have you ever been outside US? Have you ever looked at the data?
So that any country in EU has either universal or nearly universal healthcare is the same as US having over one tenth of its population completely uninsured at its best and spending tree times per capita on healthcar for worse oucome and trying actively dismantle wha tlittle health insurance people have is “papering over the problem”?
That EU as a whole has accepted – however begrudgingly, and yes, the visegrad 4 deserves a smack around the ears for their racism and xenophobia – hunderds of thousands of refugees from Middle East and Africa whilst US i doing its best to not not give visa even to those who actually helped the US armed troops in US initiated and maintained conflicts is “papering over the problem”?
That in EU with the resurgence of racism and nationalism have far right parties mostly bellow 20% in govermnent and are still held in check by opposition (Polland and Hungary are exceptions, not rule, and even there they do not have completely free reign) whilst US actually elected an open racist calling for literal concentraition camps is “papering over the problem”?
That in EU the homicide rate overall and gun homicide in particular is multiple times lower than in US in the worst cases is “papering over the problem”?
Really, give me a break. I do criticize EU in general and my home country CZ in particular quite often. We have a lot of racism, a lot of problems that could and should be adressed better.
But compared to USA the EU is Utopia. Yes, the plank size does matter. Small plank might impede the vision, but a big plank makes you completely blind. Take your whataboutism and shove it.
Signed.
Smug European.
@8 Susan Montgomery
Yeah, about those planks …
… I can’t help but notice that yours is by far the most smug voice in this discussion.
And yet, in spite of everything, the USA is still the #1 destination of immigrants and refugees. Go figure.
Posts like this make me think of a blog I once considered starting, “Benighted we stand”.
chris61
It has always surprised me that Isabel Allende now lives in the US of all places, after the CIA supported the coup against her great-uncle.
IDK — Yes, perhaps cheap and selfish to the point of being utterly cruel while they are in the voting booth…but often quite pleasant when encountered in a face to face situation (as long as its not in a big city during rush hour). I’ve lived all over the West Coast of America my whole life and though I often hate our government policies (both foreign and domestic), my daily personal interactions with Americans seem very much the same as any place else I have ever visited in this world.