A political elephant this time
Jan. 18th, 2007 02:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urocyonI just ran across a rather interesting article. Naturally, I don't agree with the author's every point, but he does make some very good ones, or at least ones that mesh with my observations. Based on experience, unlike a number of opposing critics.*
Overall, I was most struck by a couple of less-addressed points. Besides the rather broad picture of scapegoating which Bawer draws nicely, it's hard not to come away with a very major overarching theme: the whole mess is highly reminiscent of siblings an hour past bedtime, sniping and squabbling. Bawer is hardly exempt.
This theme has been painfully obvious to me, since I finally put a finger on it. Both sides in this perennial finger-pointing are working on very similar sets of assumptions, most of the time unaware of this because they're so culturally ingrained.
The ingrained nature struck me even harder last week, when I mentioned frustration with the U.S. (a.k.a. "the bratty little brother who keeps throwing up everything you've ever done into your face") being roundly scapegoated for continuing earlier British policies--and Ingvar surprised me. As I recall--and I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm off ;)--he offered the opinion that much European frustration comes from the fact that they'd stopped doing various things and would have expected the U.S. to have also done so by now. The way this view was expressed, it obviously depended on accepting Western notions of "Progress" and "Civilization" (whether or not one realizes how deep-seated the concepts are, or that one is depending on them at all!), and I had no decent reply at the time.
This is just one of the preconceptions people on both sides of this one are sharing, without even realizing it most of the time, I suspect. There are very small cultural variations, in the scheme of things, which are inflated by each party. Look at the "individualism" vs. "collectivism" (for smallish values of each, AFAICT) debate. Not to mention the zillions of nasty behaviors the U.S. hardly invented out of the air, as I was mentioning in that conversation. It seems far too easy to lock horns in such cases. My folks seem to have done so with the Cherokee, to the detriment of defense against far larger threats. Ask Vercingetorix, for that matter, and so on. Maybe, just maybe, we can try learning from history, without all the ideological distortions.
But Bromark and Herbjørnsrud state flatly that "It wasn't the Vietnam War that made European intellectuals, authors and academics anti-American. The truth is that they had been anti-American all along." As early as 1881, the Norwegian author Bjørnsterne Bjørnson argued that Europe's America-bashing had to stop; even earlier, in 1869, James Russell Lowell complained that Europeans invariably saw America "in caricature."19 Indeed, nineteenth-century European aristocrats despised America as a symbol of progress, innovation, and (above all) equality, ridiculing it as a mongrel land of simple-minded Indians and blacks; later, avaricious Jews were added to the list. These stereotypes soon spread to Americans generally, resulting in today's European-establishment view of Americans as materialistic morons.
Of course, the 18th Century produced such wits as Dr Johnson. Some of us are products of all the beforementioned unsavory categories of people (plus some Irish, oh dear), many of them held as convicts and slaves before the U.S. came along--and are still uncomfortably aware of this fact. Look at the great reputation the former penal colony of Georgia still has.**
Note that these writers were not marginal cranks: they were major literary figures. Nor were these Norwegian writers very different from their colleagues south of the Skaggerak. For an appalling number of them, America's supreme iniquity was, as Bromark and Herbjørnsrud put it, its "project of [ethnic] blending." Such views, which remained in the European mainstream well into the 1950s, had by the 1970s, however, been supplanted by reflexive, supercilious condemnations of American racism, the implication usually being that racial prejudices of the sort found in the U.S. were utterly foreign to Europeans.
Let it suffice to say that I rarely had to think about my own ethnicity until I hit the U.K. and started hearing appalling terms like "half-caste" used on the street--with no particular malice attached, it must be said. If anything, that is more shocking. It seems a fairly good indication that something is very wrong indeed when people honestly believe that laws against "inciting racial hatred" are necessary. See David Stannard's American Holocaust for more on the deep Western roots of racism, for that matter. It has not just gone away.
I just keep finding myself having the same sort of reaction to all manner of shrillness as Bawer apparently had to Dinesh D'Souza's claims:
(He never tells us what he means by "normal"-and one is not sure one wishes to know.) Muslims, he notes, "say our women are 'loose,' and in a sense they are right." (Yes, if by "loose" you mean that they have the same sexual freedom as men; it's called "equal rights.") The father of a young daughter, D'Souza says he has "come to realize how much more difficult it is to raise her well in America than it would be . . . to raise her in India." (Yes, if by "raise her well" you mean-oh, never mind. You get the idea.)
This reaction does make for slow reading sometimes!
If you suspect you don't even have a full grasp of the common assumptions involved, being an observer can be frustrating but still amusing. Having shrill people trying to drag you into the fray--when you are openly disinterested in discussing political matters--with straw-man and/or ad personam arguments, is damned annoying. What gall.***
I can't help but feel like I am pointing out the elephant in the living room yet again. It seems to be one of my jobs, for good or bad.
* A point supported by Bawer's commentary on Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud's Frykten for Amerika:
Though fewer than 14% of Frenchmen have visited America, "most have strong views" of it; indeed, "Europeans who have not been in the U.S. . . . have the strongest opinions" about it, and malice toward America is inversely proportional to the amount of time individuals have actually spent there.
The cognitive dissonance still amazes me, even understanding some of the functions such attitudes serve.
** As illustrated in one of Bawer's endnotes: "In Ich Bin Ein Amerikaner, Willis meets a Southerner who doesn't know where Norway is; Willis chooses to interpret this-with a vengeance-as proof not of his own country's obscurity but of Southern feeble-mindedness." There are reasons that we are scapegoats among the scapegoated.
*** Not that I claim to be completely devoid of gall, myself. ;)
Overall, I was most struck by a couple of less-addressed points. Besides the rather broad picture of scapegoating which Bawer draws nicely, it's hard not to come away with a very major overarching theme: the whole mess is highly reminiscent of siblings an hour past bedtime, sniping and squabbling. Bawer is hardly exempt.
This theme has been painfully obvious to me, since I finally put a finger on it. Both sides in this perennial finger-pointing are working on very similar sets of assumptions, most of the time unaware of this because they're so culturally ingrained.
The ingrained nature struck me even harder last week, when I mentioned frustration with the U.S. (a.k.a. "the bratty little brother who keeps throwing up everything you've ever done into your face") being roundly scapegoated for continuing earlier British policies--and Ingvar surprised me. As I recall--and I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm off ;)--he offered the opinion that much European frustration comes from the fact that they'd stopped doing various things and would have expected the U.S. to have also done so by now. The way this view was expressed, it obviously depended on accepting Western notions of "Progress" and "Civilization" (whether or not one realizes how deep-seated the concepts are, or that one is depending on them at all!), and I had no decent reply at the time.
This is just one of the preconceptions people on both sides of this one are sharing, without even realizing it most of the time, I suspect. There are very small cultural variations, in the scheme of things, which are inflated by each party. Look at the "individualism" vs. "collectivism" (for smallish values of each, AFAICT) debate. Not to mention the zillions of nasty behaviors the U.S. hardly invented out of the air, as I was mentioning in that conversation. It seems far too easy to lock horns in such cases. My folks seem to have done so with the Cherokee, to the detriment of defense against far larger threats. Ask Vercingetorix, for that matter, and so on. Maybe, just maybe, we can try learning from history, without all the ideological distortions.
But Bromark and Herbjørnsrud state flatly that "It wasn't the Vietnam War that made European intellectuals, authors and academics anti-American. The truth is that they had been anti-American all along." As early as 1881, the Norwegian author Bjørnsterne Bjørnson argued that Europe's America-bashing had to stop; even earlier, in 1869, James Russell Lowell complained that Europeans invariably saw America "in caricature."19 Indeed, nineteenth-century European aristocrats despised America as a symbol of progress, innovation, and (above all) equality, ridiculing it as a mongrel land of simple-minded Indians and blacks; later, avaricious Jews were added to the list. These stereotypes soon spread to Americans generally, resulting in today's European-establishment view of Americans as materialistic morons.
Of course, the 18th Century produced such wits as Dr Johnson. Some of us are products of all the beforementioned unsavory categories of people (plus some Irish, oh dear), many of them held as convicts and slaves before the U.S. came along--and are still uncomfortably aware of this fact. Look at the great reputation the former penal colony of Georgia still has.**
Note that these writers were not marginal cranks: they were major literary figures. Nor were these Norwegian writers very different from their colleagues south of the Skaggerak. For an appalling number of them, America's supreme iniquity was, as Bromark and Herbjørnsrud put it, its "project of [ethnic] blending." Such views, which remained in the European mainstream well into the 1950s, had by the 1970s, however, been supplanted by reflexive, supercilious condemnations of American racism, the implication usually being that racial prejudices of the sort found in the U.S. were utterly foreign to Europeans.
Let it suffice to say that I rarely had to think about my own ethnicity until I hit the U.K. and started hearing appalling terms like "half-caste" used on the street--with no particular malice attached, it must be said. If anything, that is more shocking. It seems a fairly good indication that something is very wrong indeed when people honestly believe that laws against "inciting racial hatred" are necessary. See David Stannard's American Holocaust for more on the deep Western roots of racism, for that matter. It has not just gone away.
I just keep finding myself having the same sort of reaction to all manner of shrillness as Bawer apparently had to Dinesh D'Souza's claims:
(He never tells us what he means by "normal"-and one is not sure one wishes to know.) Muslims, he notes, "say our women are 'loose,' and in a sense they are right." (Yes, if by "loose" you mean that they have the same sexual freedom as men; it's called "equal rights.") The father of a young daughter, D'Souza says he has "come to realize how much more difficult it is to raise her well in America than it would be . . . to raise her in India." (Yes, if by "raise her well" you mean-oh, never mind. You get the idea.)
This reaction does make for slow reading sometimes!
If you suspect you don't even have a full grasp of the common assumptions involved, being an observer can be frustrating but still amusing. Having shrill people trying to drag you into the fray--when you are openly disinterested in discussing political matters--with straw-man and/or ad personam arguments, is damned annoying. What gall.***
I can't help but feel like I am pointing out the elephant in the living room yet again. It seems to be one of my jobs, for good or bad.
* A point supported by Bawer's commentary on Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud's Frykten for Amerika:
Though fewer than 14% of Frenchmen have visited America, "most have strong views" of it; indeed, "Europeans who have not been in the U.S. . . . have the strongest opinions" about it, and malice toward America is inversely proportional to the amount of time individuals have actually spent there.
The cognitive dissonance still amazes me, even understanding some of the functions such attitudes serve.
** As illustrated in one of Bawer's endnotes: "In Ich Bin Ein Amerikaner, Willis meets a Southerner who doesn't know where Norway is; Willis chooses to interpret this-with a vengeance-as proof not of his own country's obscurity but of Southern feeble-mindedness." There are reasons that we are scapegoats among the scapegoated.
*** Not that I claim to be completely devoid of gall, myself. ;)
