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Thursday, September 30, 2004
Self-Respect
From Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals:
While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset say No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye -- this need to direct one's view outward intead of back to oneself -- is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all -- its action is fundamentally reaction.
The reverse is the case with the noble mode of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks its opposite only so as to affirm itself more gratefully and triumphantly -- its negative concept "low," "common," "bad" is only a subsequently-invented pale, contrasting image in relation to its positive basic concept -- filled with life and passion through and through.... There is indeed too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much looking away and impatience involved in contempt, even too much joyfulness, for it to be able to transform its object into a real caricature and monster.
We are all familiar with the image of the ugly American, the person who carries a sense of superiority while being largely ignorant about the rest of the world. Presumably if we knew more about the rest of the world, we wouldn't be so self-satisfied and might vote for Swedish health-care or some such.
That our arrogance occurs alongside ignorance, however, should be considered a plus; it means that our arrogance, i.e., our comfort with ourselves, does not stem principally from a comparison with others. We love what we have because it brings its own satisfactions and simply because it is our own. Even when we do make comparisons with other nations, we invariably choose the measures that make us look good: military power, GNP, personal liberty, and so forth. This furthers our myopic view of things, to be sure, but these measures are not cherry-picked. They genuinely represent what we value the most. Our standards are thus largely home-grown.
A love of one's own might not fit the cosmopolitan ideal, but it is not unprincipled. Everyone should love their own, except in those cases where one's own is extremely self-destructive. I have lived all but four years of my life in Georgia, and would be happy to end my time here, but I have absolutely no reason to give as to why someone from Oregon should feel the same way. In fact, it is a little embarrasing to have a stranger praise your way of life as superior to his own. It smacks of impiety. It is like those awkward moments when a young child wishes to have someone else's parents instead.
To complain about the United States as an imperial power and then to complain about our lack of curiosity toward the rest of the world is a little odd, and suggests that at least one of the complaints shouldn't be taken seriously. Imagine the nations on the outskirts of the ancient Roman empire wishing that the Romans would just pay them some more attention! One of our obstacles in Iraq is that we just don't have many soldiers who know the languages, and yet people around the world deride us because most of us can only speak one language. "Please learn our languages so you can conquer us more easily." Perhaps they overstate their fears.
I come across sometimes as the chairman of the booster club for team USA, but the truth is that I've had to make my own peace with the American spirit. Growing up, I had the impression that most people live lives of petty ambitions. Even in college, at a fairly selective institution, I had a fair amount of condescension toward my fellow students whose motives were not, by my accounting, as pure as my own. At some point, however, I realized that it did not make sense to judge others by what was good for me, even if what was good for me was somehow better than what was good for them. Take people as they are, and you can start to enjoy them.
We are, by and large, a vulgar nation. Wealth and isolation are not great spurs to spiritual reflection. Our vulgarity, however, is honest and mostly harmless. It does not need the approval of others. (I would bet that most Americans have little idea how much American culture is exported to the rest of the world.) It is not quite the noble conduct that Nietzsche speaks of in the passage I cite above, but it is not a slavish conduct either. I can live with that.
When I listen to Kerry attack Bush for failing to be a good global leader, I feel ill at ease, and my first instinct is to resort to the familiar arguments: Bush did work hard to get the UN on board, he did put together an impressive coalition, etc. As I think about it more, however, I believe my unease stems from a more fundamental problem, namely, that I'm not much interested in any U.S. President being a global leader, or the U.S. being a leader among nations. As philosophers have been saying for over two thousand years, leaders are slaves to those who follow, not vice versa. Our failure in the UN was distressing, but even more distressing perhaps is that we find ourselves in a situation where it matters to us that we persuade the French and the Chinese. Even the "hearts and minds" campaign in Iraq shares in this misfortune. To think that we are distressed because a lot of Sunni Iraqis have not given their support to our vision of democracy makes me want to go shower and clean myself.
That's not to say that we have a lot of choices. Our security depends, I believe, on aggressive policies that root out support for terrorism. These policies demand that we become more adept at working with others. May the day come when we can forget these things we've learned.
Eddie 9:39 PM
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