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is responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center?" I was
asked on Counterspin, Canada's version of Crossfire.
"The men
who hijacked the planes and flew them into the buildings, and those
who financed and assisted them," I replied.
It was the
wrong answer.
Another guest
swiftly explained that though the terrorists were indeed partly
to blame, we must understand that they were themselves responding
to deeper causes — the general poverty and hopelessness of
Afghanistan and many other Muslim countries, of course, but also
America's interventions in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. By
joining Pakistan in supporting the more fundamentalist mujahedin
in the 1980s and then leaving postwar Afghanistan to fend for itself,
the U.S. had helped to create the Taliban. And by basing infidel
American troops in Saudi Arabia near the Muslim holy places during
the Gulf War, the U.S. drove Osama bin Laden to transform himself
into the Ford Foundation of terrorism. Americans themselves must
therefore accept some of the blame for the terrorist attacks of
September 11.
Now, there
are reasonable criticisms of U.S. foreign policy embedded in that
argument, for my fellow guests on Counterspin were in the
main reasonable. Even so, that particular mixture of arguments does
not even begin to establish some remote American responsibility
for the acts of terrorism. It slyly implies that the U.S. spontaneously
erupted into Afghanistan and the Gulf, when in fact the U.S. involved
itself in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet occupation of that
country, and placed troops in the Gulf to reverse the invasion of
Kuwait — acting in both cases at the request of Muslim and
Arab powers. It glosses over the fact that the U.S. was following
Pakistan's lead in supporting Afghan fundamentalists for the practical
reason that the U.S., which is not omnipotent, needed Pakistan's
help in assisting the Afghan resistance. And it generally exaggerates
America's capacity for either harm or good, by blaming the U.S.
for the poverty and backwardness of Arab and Muslim countries, including
Afghanistan, when those evils very largely stem from the failure
of such societies to generate civil institutions, sensible economic
policies, or free democratic governments (or, in the case of Afghanistan,
any kind of stable government at all). In the light of such persistent
systemic failures, it is perverse to blame America for not imposing
political and economic enlightenment on these societies — the
more so when we all know that America would instantly be denounced
for cultural imperialism if it tried to do so.
But the Canadian
audience did not really want to hear such an exculpation. It did
not want to place the blame for over 6,000 violent deaths on the
shoulders of the terrorists alone. Nor was this because it was composed
of Muslims or anti-Americans (though there were probably some of
both present). You would have had a very similar reaction from almost
any Ivy League audience. Or from the League of Women Voters. Or
from a session of Americans for Democratic Action. Or from a town
meeting in almost any college town or gentrified urban area in the
U.S. For in the Western world today there is a substantial audience-well
short of a majority but still large — for arguments that combine
two factors: a tendency to self-blame and a taste for complex causal
explanations, preferably made still more complex by social-science
jargon.
Examine some
of the "anti-American" remarks made since September 11.
Here, for instance, is a columnist in the student newspaper at the
University of Michigan. Its author is a young man, of course, but
his reflections mirror more senior academic opinion, as well as
the opinions of Susan Sontag, Michael Moore, and the rest of the
usual suspects. If it seems harsh to single him out for criticism
here, remember that he will be extravagantly praised by those suspects
for his idealism in penning these thoughts:
If the leadership
of this country has its way, a dangerous cycle will be allowed
to continue. It is one in which America makes enemies abroad,
via broken treaties, unattended summits, and tyrannical international
policing. Terrorism follows, allowing leaders to call for appropriations
to "fix" our national defense. The cycle needs to end,
and it ends at the beginning. Funding the military at this point
is a band-aid solution to a more complex problem.
Ah yes, as
the English critic John Gross has remarked: "Complexity is
the first refuge of the scoundrel." If indeed the World Trade
Center was attacked because the U.S. withdrew from the Kyoto treaty,
then the primary suspects are presumably the German and French "Green"
parties, which were the bodies most enthusiastic about it. The Muslim
countries were either indifferent to it, or nervously skeptical
(some oil-producing countries), or outspokenly hostile (Malaysia).
But our student strategist does not wish to place even partial or
subsidiary blame for the attack on anyone but America. In his formulation,
no one actually does the terrorism; it merely "follows"
from some prior American beastliness, such as withdrawing from an
international conference booming with anti-Semitic rhetoric. The
terrorists themselves were not active protagonists in this scenario;
they merely went through certain motions that American diplomacy
had set in train, like billiard balls clicking over the green baize.
But the U.S., when it retaliates, will enjoy no such excuse: Any
response to the World Trade Center attack will be seen as a free
and premeditated act of "tyrannical international policing."
In the immediate
aftermath of the murder of more than 6,000 Americans, such comments
have been relatively rare and muted in the U.S. They have been more
common abroad: Fintan O'Toole in the Irish Times describing
the U.S. as "merciless and arrogant"; the British New
Statesman explaining that the Americans deserved to be bombed
because they had voted for Bush, and even Gore, rather than for
Ralph Nader; Edward Said in the London Observer unmasking
the naïve American concepts of "freedom and terrorism"
as "large abstractions [that] have mostly hidden sordid material
interests, the influence of the oil, defense and Zionist lobbies
now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old
religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam' that takes new
forms every day"; an entire stable of Guardian writers
all piously hoping that Americans will now take the trouble to learn
from this painful episode why they are "hated"; and almost
all of this vile nonsense written in falsely neutral or sympathetic
tones behind which a passionate hostility is barely held in check,
like a Freudian psychoanalyst explaining to a patient of whom he
is secretly and viciously jealous the valid reasons why no one likes
him.
When such comments
appear, we are reasonably inclined to describe them as uncomplicatedly
"anti-American." But it would be mistaken to see them
as exhibiting a foreign nationalist rejection of American influence.
Such feelings do exist, of course: sometimes in diplomatic or European
bureaucracies, sometimes in intellectual coteries like the High
Tory historians who blame the U.S. for the decline of the British
Empire. But these are minority reactions. Most anti-American diatribes
of the kind quoted above come from people who dislike their own
country almost as much as they dislike America. Indeed, their dislike
of the U.S. is partly rooted in their perception that America is
an obstacle to their hopes of transforming their own societies in
a statist, regulated, and bureaucratic direction. By its example,
America gives hope to both the organic traditionalist and the spontaneous
modernizing elements in their own societies. And, of course, many
Americans share the sentiments of those who would reject these American
influences — which is why anti-Americanism has been a popular
import in certain parts of the U.S. in recent years.
Self-blame
and a taste for complexity go very comfortably together to form
something I call "counter-tribalism." This is a form of
intellectual snobbery. A person in its grip has imbibed the notion
that the patriotism of ordinary people is something simplistic,
vulgar, and shameful, and thus to be avoided. He has been told that
a genuinely sophisticated person — a university professor,
say — has thrown off patriotic prejudice to become a citizen
of the world. Now, of course, genuine cosmopolitanism is an admirable
thing, drawing upon wide cultural sympathies but perfectly compatible
with a simple love of country, as the work of any number of poets
demonstrates. It is accordingly very rare. So what the counter-tribalist
mistakes for cosmopolitanism is an inverted jingoism — an instinctive
preference for other nations and a marked prejudice that in any
conflict the enemy of America is in the right.
Hence the extraordinary
convolutions whereby feminists and multiculturalists find themselves
taking the side of medieval Islamists against the common American
enemy. They feel more comfortable in such superior company than
alongside a hard-hat construction worker or a suburban golfer in
plaid pants. But such preferences take some explaining. Hence not
merely the taste for — but the absolute necessity of —
complex explanations.
And all of
this is in service of the notion of separating oneself from one's
fellow citizens who are not sophisticated enough to rise above simple
loyalties. A wonderful example of such self-infatuation comes from
Barbara Kingsolver, commenting on patriotism:
Patriotism
threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful
hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders, and pleas for
peace. It despises people of foreign birth who've spent years
learning our culture and contributing their talents to our economy
. . . In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation,
censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving
the Constitution through a paper-shredder.
Despite its
obvious intellectual deficiencies, counter-tribalism has advanced
considerably in recent years. Many of America's troubles stem in
part from the fact that it is the first nation with a dissident
ruling class. Our elites in government, cultural institutions, the
courts, the media, and even business have increasingly adopted the
view that the American people are racist, sexist, and homophobic,
and that it is therefore a prime duty of government to protect other
people from them. In the current crisis, commentators have been
predicting a vast national pogrom against American Muslims and have
had desperately to exaggerate the relatively few (if shameful) incidents
that have occurred to avoid disappointing their readers. In foreign
policy, the first instinct of diplomatic elites when faced with
a hostile attack is not to "overreact." What makes the
situation worse is that the elites have had some success in inculcating
counter-tribalism into a large lumpenintelligentsia of teachers,
librarians, researchers, small-town-newspaper "liberals,"
clergymen, and assorted ancillary brainworkers. As journalist Mark
Steyn has pointed out, in his own district the local teachers and
clergymen were primarily concerned not to allow the reactions of
the local people to degenerate into patriotic national sentiment.
Twenty years of inculcating multiculturalist clichés into
people has made the old expressions of patriotic sentiment seem
taboo and even racist to some ears.
Will the terrorist
attack change all this? Will it provoke a cultural change in America
that will make patriotism seem more natural to the elites? Will
it, indeed, mean that a different America will develop a wider and
more inclusive patriotism, one more likely to defeat the multicultural
platitudes in vogue until recently? All these things are possible.
But they will not happen by themselves. In particular, they will
not happen without intellectual and moral effort on the part of
people who know that patriotism is a virtue perfectly compatible
with other virtues such as a genuine easygoing tolerance. Indeed,
an American patriotism (and, I would add, a British one) would be
among other things a celebration of tolerance. A first step in present
circumstances, however, is to reveal the arguments of the counter-tribalists
for the shallow, silly, self-regarding snobbery they undoubtedly
are.
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