American Exceptionalism

Bruce Mazlish

Today's post comes from Bruce Mazlish, professor emeritus of history at MIT. A distinguished historian, he is the author or editor of a variety of books and articles, including: The Global History Reader (Routledge, 2005), ed. by Mazlish and Akira Iriye; The New Global History (Routledge, 2006); and The Uncertain Sciences (Yale, 1998; paper Transaction Press, 2007) .

All peoples think of themselves as special, their way of life as exceptional. The USA certainly thinks of itself as exceptional, elevating the claim to a national shibboleth. This claim guides the country in its thinking and behavior in international affairs. Though all are exceptional, America sees itself as more exceptional than others. The implications of this conviction are profound and fundamental. Inquiry into this belief system, given the power, economic and military of the country, appears necessary.1

Its roots are deep and tangled. In Ian Tyrrell's definition, "The idea of the United States as a unique and indeed superior civilization outside the normal historically determined path of human history lies at the heart of American exceptionalism."2 With this provisional definition, we can proceed to examine the origins of the experience and its phases.

Apparently, one of the earliest formulations comes from a Marxist analysis claiming that America is exceptional in not having a true class system. Hence socialism does not flourish in America as it does elsewhere. This was a theory advanced by Werner Sombart, a Marxist influenced historian. However, before Sombart, Alexis de Tocqueville had used the term "exceptional" in his Democracy in America. One aspect of America for him was that as a nation it had been born in the light of day i.e., its origins not lost in the forests of the past but visible to contemporary observers. Even before the Frenchman's classic analysis, a general European view of the continent stressed both the unparalleled possibility of abundance in the New World as well as its dark barbarianism, seeing them as exceptional. The encounter with the Indians seemed to be unique (very different from that in South America).

The original colonists of New England had faith that the New World was liberated from the dead hand of the past and no longer subject to the strictures of what we would now call historical determinism. It had a special mission, to spread its creed of freedom to the rest of the world (a latent contradiction to exceptionalism?) In the process, the carriers of this creed were experiencing a rebirth. In the view of Richard Slotkin, this belief had a dark side. "The first colonists," he writes, "saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."3

In his article on American exceptionalism, Seymour Martin Lipset quotes G.K. Chesterton to the effect that "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed."4 That creed was to be a light to the world; the nation had a divine mission to spread the blessings of freedom and liberty to the rest of the world (even by violence, if necessary).

Clearly, the concept is a fundamental part of the American belief system. Its implications are extremely important. I want to argue that we must see the concept historically, as a dynamic part of the American experience. In doing so, we can discern two major phases. The first is a more or less benign expression. It has led the US into seeking to support freedom of dissent and human rights in many parts of the world. Alas, the country has been hypocritical in the way it does this. All too often, it says one thing and does another. For example, it proclaims freedom and democracy and then supports autocratic countries such as Saudi Arabia. It behaves occasionally according to a double standard. Opposing torture elsewhere, it has practiced it within its own borders. This becomes increasingly clear as we look at more recent history.

I want to suggest that there are variants on American exceptionalism: benign and malignant. The benign is most marked in the 18th and 19th centuries as America sought to fulfill Winthrop's prophesy of its being a city on a hill that would serve as a light for the rest of mankind. With all its deep-rooted faults at home—slavery being the “blackest”—ranging from its treatment of the Indians to its continental and then overseas imperialism, America, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, the port through which so many of its immigrants arrived, seemed to beckon all peoples to the freedom and liberty of the country. Abroad, it strove to spread its message as widely as possible.

Though proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine, thus announcing its dominion over both the North and South continents, along with its existing appropriation of the name "America" for itself, the nation exhibited a mix of isolationism and participation in international affairs. The benign aspect would appear especially after WW II, when America was in the foremost rank of those seeking to establish institutions and codes that would seek to punish not only war crimes but also crimes against humanity. The UN, with America providing a home for it in New York City, in 1948 issued a Declaration of Human Rights. A few years earlier in the Nuremberg trials the US was among the foremost in seeking justice on an international scale. The Yugoslav and Rwanda trials following confirmed this trend, culminating in the International Criminal Court. Elsewhere I have called this a "Judicial Revolution."5 Here was reached the sticking point for the US. It became increasingly clear, especially in the Bush administration, that America was not prepared to be held to the same justice and laws that it had so prominently helped establish.

Now emerged the malignant side of American exceptionalism. It served as one of the banners under which the US felt that it was exempt from conforming to international law except where and when it suited its own purposes. President Obama rightly takes exception to this assertion—America is a nation like all others, and subject to the same laws of history and judgment—and has been roundly criticized by Tea Party members for this statement of equality. Frequently invoked in the present, Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are reported as "denouncing Obama for denying 'American exceptionalism.'"6

There are many founding myths in America. In its malignant form, that of American exceptionalism is one of the most potently damaging, to America itself and to the world. It is time that it is dug up by the roots and placed in the trash bin. We can do this easily on the computer; it is time that we matched this action in our minds as well.

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1. The literature on "American exceptionalism" is extremely full. Rather than trying to list various titles, I refer the reader to that rubric in Google, where numerous examples are given.

2. Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism and Uneven Global Integration: Resistance to the Global Society," in The Paradox of a Global USA, ed. by Bruce Mazlish, Nayan Chanda, and Kenneth Weisbrode (Stanford, 2007).

3. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan, 1973), 5.

4. Quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, "American Exceptionalism," Washington Post, 1991.

5 . See Bruce Mazlish, The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era (Palgrave, 2009), especially Chapter 4.

6. Quoted in Thomas Friedman, "From WikiChina," New York Times, November 30, 2010.

Theo-Politics: The Kind of Talk We Really Need (Keith Watkins, Guest Post)

Keith Watkins, Emeritus Professor of Parish Ministry and Worship at Christian Theological Seminary, father of the Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins, General Minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and a friend, has launched a new blog -- Keith Watkins Historian.  I'm reposting his latest effort, a review and response to Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power.   Bacevich works with Reinhold Niebuhr's ideas, ideas that Keith reflected on in an earlier post.  I hope you will engage with this piece and make Keith's blog a regular stop -- whether you're interested in history, theology, or cycling!

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Theo-Politics: The Kind of Talk We Really Need

By Keith Watkins

How can religiously inspired ideas enter into political discussion so that theology transcends sectarianism and yet continues to be intellectually and emotionally potent? Often, this question has been answered by secularizing the discourse so much that theology virtually disappears, or by limiting the topics for which theology is allowed.

In The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Andrew J. Bacevich illustrates a better way. Using Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings as foundation, Bacevich translates a distinctively Christian theological view of reality into a public language that can be used by people who do not affirm Christian faith.

Niebuhr’s two principles were realism, which “implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is,” and humility, which includes the obligation to see ourselves “without blinders.” Hubris, realism’s enemy, “finds expression in an outsized confidence in the efficacy of American power as an instrument to reshape the global order.” Sanctimony, humility’s enemy, “gives rise to the conviction that American values and beliefs are universal and that the nation itself serves providentially assigned purposes.” Because realism and humility are in short supply today, Bacevich declares, American life and America’s role in the world are deeply flawed.

Bacevich uses the idea of freedom to explain the deep problems of American domestic affairs and world policy. Our mindless pursuit of freedom has led to its distortion and diminishment. The “central paradox of our time”—the exercise of freedom that demands that we fight around the world—undermines our capacity to fight, jeopardizes our freedom, and aggravates the disorders affecting our political freedom.

The result is that America faces crises in economic, political, and military affairs, each of which Bacevich discusses provocatively, as might be expected since he is both a retired military officer and professor at Boston University.

Half of the book analyzes political and military issues, but as a religious person I am most interested in his chapter, The Crisis of Profligacy. “For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.” In addition to its negative impacts upon personal character and well being, this quest has created a powerful and mostly negative impact upon foreign policy and American relations with the rest of the world.

Between 1979 and 1983, Bacevich writes, Americans made a fateful choice. “They could curb their appetites and learn to live within their means or deploy dwindling reserves of U.S. power in hopes of obliging others to accommodate their penchant for conspicuous consumption.” During this four-year interval, “bookended by two memorable presidential speeches,” Americans chose the latter, making these years “the true pivot of contemporary American history, far more relevant to our present predicament than supposedly decisive events like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

In July 1979, when many were insisting that threats to America came from external powers, President Jimmy Carter declared that “the real danger to American democracy lay within.” He identified an American “crisis of confidence” as “an outward manifestation of an underlying crisis of values.” In a speech delivered on March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative. In earlier speeches, he had countered Carter’s glum analysis, but in this one Reagan proposed that America had to become invulnerable and that technology could achieve that goal.

“Carter had portrayed quantity (the American preoccupation with what he had called ‘piling up material goods’) as fundamentally at odds with quality (authentic freedom as he defined it)…In Reagan’s view, quality (advanced technology converted to military use by talented, highly skilled soldiers) could sustain quantity (a consumer economy based on availability of cheap credit and cheap oil).” Carter lost both the presidency and the argument. Most Americans have embraced the Reagan view and since then we have moved ever deeper into a morass with no exit in sight.

In his concluding chapter, Bacevich reaffirms his thesis that power is limited and he again calls Americans to realism rather than idealism. We should turn our attention to the two meta-challenges” of our time: “nuclear weapons and climate change.”

What Bacevich is arguing makes sense to me. The world is big enough for everyone, so long as each of us lives modestly—loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, all within the larger context of loving God with heart soul, mind, and strength.

Here be Nephites -- Sightings

I have long had a fascination with the history of the Mormon church.  It, like my own church, has its roots on the American frontier.  In fact, a number of early Mormon leaders, including Sidney Rigdon and Parley P. Pratt, were "Campbellites" prior to joining with Joseph Smith.  So, my ears perk up when I hear something new emerging from the LDS community.  In today's edition of Sightings, Seth Perry and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, writes about a new theory as to the identity of the Nephites -- suggesting a Heartland Theory that has Nativist tendencies -- a movement within the LDS church that has implications for its future and may even include Glenn Beck among its supporters.  Intriguing essay!

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Sightings 4/29/10

Here be Nephites

-- Seth Perry

The Book of Mormon is widely viewed as the quintessentially American scripture of a quintessentially American faith, but in strictly geographical terms this designation is more complicated than it might first appear. The Book’s modern manifestation is definitely American – Joseph Smith, New York farmer, said that he dug it out of a hill near his home. Believers regard the text as having an ancient history also, though, and here the geography is less clear. According to the text, its authors were pre-Columbian inhabitants of the New World, but its geographical terms are oblique: The characters war and proselytize over a “land northward” and a “land southward,” connected by “a narrow neck of land.” Many readers have assumed that what’s described is the Western Hemisphere – North and South America connected by the isthmus of Central America. Among other things, though, this scale is too vast for the characters’ descriptions of their travel: With the farthest cities mere days apart, the whole story seems to take place within a few hundred square miles. For some time, conventional wisdom has identified that area as Mesoamerica, stretching from modern-day central Mexico to Honduras. Mesoamerica hosted advanced pre-Columbian civilizations, the thinking goes, and the land forms fit, to a certain eye. The LDS Church has no official stance on the matter, but it has tacitly endorsed this view. Significant Church resources are committed to archaeological and ethnographic projects in Mesoamerica, and Church-sanctioned visualizations of the Book of Mormon story, replete with palm trees, do not appear to be set in, say, southern Illinois.

There is a swelling movement within the Church, though, that prefers to believe that the story took place in Illinois, among other North American locales. Bruce Porter and Rod Meldrum’s Prophecies and Promises: The Book of Mormon and the United States of America is the latest salvo in this argument. The authors’ “Heartland Model” theory hinges on the numerous Book of Mormon prophecies concerning a future “mighty nation” in the New World, “a land of liberty” (2 Nephi 1:7), “choice above all other lands” (Ether 2:7), established by “Gentiles” who will come “out of captivity” and revolt against their “mother Gentiles” (1 Nephi 13:17). This nation, the prophets recorded, would exist on “this land” – in other words, the land on which the prophets themselves were then living. Porter and Meldrum believe that the prophets, then, must have lived within the current borders of the United States, since they don’t find Mesoamerica particularly “choice”: “In what way could any Central American nation be considered a mighty nation above all other nations?”

The other side’s response has been, among other things, to demonstrate from the same texts that “this land” could just as easily mean “this continent,” which would not eliminate Mesoamerica; the debate goes on. But the fact that some people are looking for sacralization of the “heartland” in the Book of Mormon just now is interesting. Fifty-seven percent of the “quintessentially American” faith’s members now live outside the United States, and most growth is happening in those less “mighty” places, such as Central America. Scholars have long wondered how Mormonism’s American character affects its overseas growth, asking whether Mormonism can take authentic root in places where the American Constitution and apple pie are unknown. The Heartland Model, though, signals the need to wonder about the other side of the equation – how is international growth affecting Mormonism at home?

Whatever else it is, the Heartland movement looks like a ripple of nativism, a twitch of insecurity among Americans in a globalizing faith. Mormons are increasingly identified with conservative politics, and in its very name the “Heartland Model” conjures the right’s renewed rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Glenn Beck – piercingly conservative but rather quietly Mormon – shilled for an April conference put on by Porter’s company, founded to promote (and monetize) the Heartland Model. And Prophecies and Promises voices a familiar-sounding political message: Rededicating the United States as the Promised Land, the authors tell us, should give believers “a more comprehensive view of the individual responsibilities…to protect the freedoms established by the Founding Fathers who came out of captivity to create this nation in the Land of Promise.”

There is a lot more change to come if Mormonism is to be the “world religion” it aspires to be. For all of the growth overseas, for example, the vast church hierarchy is still overwhelmingly composed of white American men. When and if such features begin to shift, the impulse discernible in the Heartland Model is only likely to grow stronger.

Reference:

Bruce Porter and Rod Meldrum, Prophecies and Promises: The Book of Mormon and the United States of America (Digital Legend Press, 2009).

Seth Perry is a PhD candidate in History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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In this month’s Religion and Culture Web Forum, Web Forum editor emeritus Spencer Dew explores the relationship between Jack Kerouac’s religious thought and its expressive practice in the act of writing: “Indeed, his entire oeuvre can be read as an expression of his personal religious stance, a kind of ‘fusion’ of Catholic theology with notions taken from Buddhist philosophy and practice.” Through a close reading of Kerouac’s novella Tristessa, Dew suggests that such a fusion—despite exemplifying Kerouac at his writerly best—leads to a solipsism that is ethically troubling, and likely reflective of Kerouac’s personal and professional shortcomings—especially later in his life. “Devotion to Solipsism: Religious Thought and Practice in Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa,” with invited responses from Benedict Giamo (University of Notre Dame), Nancy Grace (College of Wooster), Sarah Haynes (University of Western Illinois), Kurt Hemmer (Harper College), Amy Hungerford (Yale University), Omar Swartz (University of Colorado, Denver), Matt Theado (Gardner-Webb University), and Eric Ziolkowski (Lafayette College). http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.