I was googling this morning looking for the original 1997 article written by David Brooks and Bill Kristol about "national greatness conservatism", and I came across this article by Jonah Goldberg written in May 2001 entitled "Grading Greatness." In it, just a few months before 9/11, Goldberg wrestles with the Kristol/Brooks idea, which he is kind of attracted to, if only it wasn’t associated with John McCain. I was not particularly interested in conservative internal squabbles before the war, so I hadn’t known that neocons like Kristol supported McCain in the 2000 election cycle. That’s a fact that should influence our thinking about the current election. McCain is someone who was ten years ago, and should be now, tarred with the "national greatness conservatism" brush. The whole idea of "national greatness" is an idea that epitomizes what I think of as political immaturity. Let me explain:
I think that one of the best measure of a person’s or a society’s maturity lies in the way they confront that which they fear the most. And let me go out on a limb here and posit that what humans fear most is identity annihilation. Death is bad, but humiliating death is the worst. Death is humiliating, and every humiliation is a kind of death.
There is a whole death/humiliation complex that is behind most of the intentional violence we see, whether it is the attacks of terrorists, or crazed campus shooters, gang violence, or nations invading nations. All violence and the justification for it is cut from the same humiliation/grandiosity cloth. The terrorist who feels himself to be at the extreme of powerlessness and humiliation can get a quick shot of grandiosity by turning the tables and annihilating the identity of others. Is this really essentially different from the need so many Americans felt to just flail at the nearest target in the Middle East after the humiliation of 9/11?
There is a polarity between humiliation and grandiosity. Read your Ernest Becker
if you need to have this argued for you. But shorthand, the denial of
death leads to grandiosity. The antidote to this complex is humility, a
homeopathic cure. The difference between them is the difference between
feeling like dirt or feeling grounded on the earth. The quality of
humility as I think about it is best captured in the Yiddish word "mensch."
A mensch is somebody who is grounded and solid, someone you can rely
on, someone without pretension, just a human, but the embodiment of
everything that is decently human. A mensch is an open-hearted, wysiwyg
kind of person, someone who does not have a need to be more than he is
or is capable of being. So humility in this sense does not mean
self-effacement but to be grounded in one’s humanity.
What we are doing in Iraq is the opposite of what anybody who was
grounded in his humanity would do. It has been an adolescent, grandiose
fantasy from the beginning hatched by the adolescents at The Weekly
Standard and endorsed by the equally adolescent folks at NRO. McCain
comes across for many as a mensch, but he’s hardly that. He’s a man
who refuses to deal with reality and will do everything he can to avoid
the humiliation that follows once his balloon will have burst. Better
to stay in Iraq for one hundred years than face the humiliation of
failure.
Humiliation is what one feels when he is made to realize that his
ungrounded, grandiose self-conception has little relationship to who he
really is. Humiliation is the feeling one gets when his balloon is
burst and he comes thudding to earth. And I would argue that people
like John McCain and George Bush and the whole national greatness
neocon network are doing everything they can to postpone the day when
they must finally deal with the bursting of their balloon. We are not
dealing with people here who are grounded in reality or in their own
humanity. We are dealing with people who are living in an abstracted
grandiose fantasy of national greatness and who will continue the waste
and killing so long as it will mean not having to come thudding to
earth. And when the grownups finally take over and burst the fantasy
once and for all, they will rage and scream and blame them for the
national humiliation.
There will be work enough for the grownups cleaning up the mess
they’ve
made, and to have to listen to their incessant whining will be close to
intolerable. The question then will be whether the rest of the country
will have the maturity to tell them to shut up or to ignore them when
they won’t.
The grownups in the meanwhile have the much harder task of trying to
find a sense of purpose that does not involve adolescent fears of
identity annihilation or fantasies of world-annihilating power. And
that’s not easy to do. But I think it’s a task more for the cultural
sphere than the political. It has to do with the development of a
collective sense of human future possibility. And that, I would argue,
is a spiritual task, not an economic or military one.
P.S. The highest compliment my adolescent son can pay to the
teachers and parents of friends he knows is that they are "down to
earth." Healthy kids have an instinctive feeling for the menschiness of
the adults they come across. If they are lucky they have some mensch
adults in their lives to give them some sense of what it means to be a
grownup. I don’t think that the idealism of youth is anything more than
an aspiration to a basic, grounded human decency. And while kids are
capable of accepting the foibles and imperfections of the adults in
their lives, they cannot abide gameplaying, hypocrisy, and their
refusal to admit they’re wrong when they’re wrong.
These are the worst offenses against being down to earth–and these
are the characteristics of politicians of both parties as a class. And
so I would add this one last thought: perhaps the attraction young
people have to Obama is not because of his pie-in-the-sky idealism, but
because he comes across as someone who is down to earth–at least when
compared to the consummate gameplayer and triangulator he is opposing
for the nomination. He is for me, as I think he is for most kids, an
image of human decency and maturity. He’s grounded on the earth, not
in the Beltway reality that Hillary claims as her chief credential.
Leave a Reply