By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Americans of a hundred years ago might well consider today’s culture as “exceptional,” but they wouldn’t consider it a compliment.
In Federalist One, Alexander Hamilton writes:
“It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
Clearly, America was exceptional in 1787. Americans knew it, and knew why. In his Farewell Address, George Washington spelled it out: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” he told the Congress. “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”
Some forty years later, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Christianity ran so deep in the American character that he called it “an established and irresistible fact which no one seeks to attack or defend.” Americans uniquely believed that religion was “necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions,” he observed.
Another European agrees. “Alexis de Tocqueville, in his day, observed that democracy in America had become possible and had worked because there existed a fundamental moral consensus which, transcending individual denominations, united everyone,” Pope Benedict XVI told the Curia eleven years ago.
“This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is at risk wherever its place, the place of moral reasoning, is taken by the purely instrumental rationality of which I spoke earlier. In reality, this makes reason blind to what is essential. To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.”
Exceptional Americans
Where do we find America’s “fundamental consensus” today? Clearly not in the political sphere, where villains masquerade as heroes. Instead of admitting their mistakes and correcting them, our “leaders” glorify and perpetuate them.
For Tocqueville, America was exceptional because of what we shared in common. Without that common spirit, “community” dissipates. And Confucius pointed out that true communication is impossible when we cannot even agree on the meaning of words.
“We hold these truths” united us. But for many Americans today, regardless of party, those realities we once shared as a historical people have faded into vague abstractions, nestled comfortably in an inchoate civil religion, invoked, if at all, more to manipulate the people than to unite them.
Rejected by the popular culture, the metaphysical goods that constitute our Christian heritage are denied, even attacked, by “our” government’s “instrumental rationality” that thrives on abstractions and hijacked language.
Bad ideas have bad consequences. Can we “follow the science” and yet deny the humanity of the unborn child? Does one have to be a Muslim terrorist to descry widespread moral squalor and cultural corruption in our midst, or to perceive America on the brink of becoming a decadent, materialist wasteland?
If that be the case, then we are “exceptional” only because we are delusional, and American Exceptionalism amounts to little more than ideological blather — tall-talking patriotic chutzpah concocted to justify America’s “right” to export democracy to the world by force while diminishing liberty at home.
To Washington, Tocqueville, and many of our own Supreme Pontiffs, genuine American Exceptionalism requires Exceptional Americans — virtuous Americans, rational Americans, and yes, Americans who embrace, preserve, defend, and celebrate our Christian and constitutional heritage. To reduce that treasured reality to a dry husk of “democracy” that can be imposed on tribal societies that border on barbarism, defy rationality, and demonize Christianity constitutes a political hoax and an intellectual fraud. The strength of our republic flows not from a few facile abstractions but from twenty centuries of history and a “Firm Reliance on Divine Providence.”
So: Is America still exceptional, or is it sinking into the post-modernist mire? I rely on an image that Erik von Kuehneldt-Leddihn offered many years ago: If American Exceptionalism merely amounts to a shopworn excuse for power and war, useful for manipulation but devoid of meaningful content, then we are “living off the whiff of an empty bottle.”
Today’s “American Exceptionalism” comes right out of Orwell’s Newspeak — it proclaims a gnostic rejection of human nature. It is a quality is possessed not by all, but only a few — those far-sighted members of Big Brother’s Inner Party. It reflects the triumph not of Russell Kirk, but of Hegel. It flourishes in the immanentist progressive mind that conveniently hijacks the “conservative” label because the dialectic considers that term to be the most popular option at the moment.
Metaphysically Speaking
“Indeed, many are the conceits of human beings; evil imaginations lead them astray” (Sirach 3:24).
We conservatives have suspected all along that those nasty, power-hungry liberals are immoral — and often, we’ve been right: After all, when the Dictatorship of Relativism reigns, Christ is on the cross. But those intoxicated by the exceptionalist reverie can mistakenly come to believe that we are not subject to the same temptations: Since we are conservative, we might be immune to infection by libido dominandi and superbia vitae. But these lusts are more powerful than simple physical appetites. And they tempt us all.
One of the most powerful temptations is also the most noxious: remember how “9/11 Changed Everything”? Well, now we know better — but only after some folks succumbed to the dialectic’s gentle prodding and decided they’d turn reality upside down. In this dream world, we could benevolently spend untold trillions without care, proudly convert the world to a civil religion of secular democracy, and, ultimately, in triumph, “rid the world of evil,” because “our dream cannot die.”
Twenty years later, the shards of the exceptionalist dream lie strewn in the wake of a nightmare. Yet the troubling temptation has survived in our national discourse. As a result, the contemporary gnostic tendency that Eric Voegelin traces to the Middle Ages and beyond now energizes policy and punditry on a wide scale.
Mention “gnostic” or “Manichee” to the typical pol and you’ll get a blank stare. But the battle rages. Today’s “conservative” political discourse often features assumptions that deny metaphysics and man’s fallen nature, instead unconsciously embracing the dialectical alternative.
Our nation is suffering from a profound crisis. Whatever prudential approaches today’s conservatives advocate, it would serve us well to bear in mind these timeless fundamentals. Without the metaphysical yardstick of right and wrong, the abyss is our only option. Since Aristotle, the West has known — proven, in fact — that, while good men can muddle through a bad constitution, bad men can wreck the best of them.
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