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07/11/2004:

"Reflections on American Pathology"

by Richard Lichtman counterpunch.org
After September 11 much was made of America's "loss of innocence." What was meant by this phrase was that our sense of inviolable security had been forever breached and that we could no longer feel safe in our impregnable fortress, this chosen land protected by two oceans and God's divine munificence that had so defined us as blessed and so granted us suzerainty as "the first new nation" and "the city on the hill."

Of course, such a realization of utter vulnerability as 9/11 provided would assuredly produce a violent trauma in our national consciousness. But the wound went deeper still. For it has always been a fundamental assumption of the American political- religious psyche that we alone were inviolable, and that our geographical distance from the remainder of the world conferred upon us a special status among nations, one that freed us from concern for immediate political consequence and thereby provided us with an impartiality of judgment marked by a special purity. In the middle ages the distribution of land was understood as the embodiment of God's transcendent purpose, and similarly, in the consciousness of the first Puritan settlers our secure distance from Europe was construed as an ideological premise in an argument that provided us with unique moral possibility. Our geographical separation and our moral mission were merged into a single claim of unique theological purpose.

From its Puritan origins America was steeped in a transcendent claim to moral purpose and mission. The "American jeremiad," as Sacvan Berkovitch has reminded us, produced as one of its cultural manifestations such ceremonial confirmations as the litany of Fourth of July oratory, hailing in Charleston in 1788, "the Revolution as the beginning of a new age in human history;" and in New York, proclaiming, in the words of Thomas Yarrow, "From their birth," the American states were "designed to be the redeemers of mankind." From Pennsylvania to Rhode Island, the country was averred "the Great Temple of Liberty." "Long streams of light emanate from its portals...its turrets will stream into the heaven...and the pillar of divine glory, descending from God, will rest forever on its summit." In Maine, Virginia and South Carolina, orators asserted the correspondence between local developments and the "vast design of providence...for the universal redemption of the human race." This was not the vision of human corruption born of original sin that the Puritans had brought with them from the despair of Europe. Nor was it merely a proclamation of American superiority, though this claim was certainly included. It was, rather, the embrace of a mandate to lead the "redemption of the human race" in total transfiguration. Winthrop's very notion of "a city upon a hill" connoted separation from the turmoil of European corruption for the sake of a new social order. The water passage was a metaphorical ablution, a symbolic rite of purification from those sins of our original nature.

Berkovitch has stated the matter with brilliant concision:

"Only in the United States has nationalism carried with it the Christian meaning of the sacred. Only America, of all national designations, has assumed the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many other societies have defended the status quo by reference to religious values; many forms of nationalism have laid claim to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in secret or open heresy, to find the sacred in the profane, and many European defenders of middle class democracy have tried to link order and progress. But only the American Way, of all modern ideologies, has managed to circumvent the paradoxes inherent in these approaches. Of all the symbols of identity, only America has united nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive history, the country's past and paradise to be, in a single synthetic voice."

And Melville, in his novel White-Jacket:

"And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people -- the Israel of our time; we bear the arc of the liberties of the world...God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls...Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us."counterpunch.org