Monday, March 28, 2005
(12:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Epistemic Advantages of a Blame America First Attitude
Of course an instinctive "blame America first" attitude is not an adequate response to the full range of historical reality. Of course there have been terrible rulers in all parts of the world who have committed horrible crimes without the aid of the United States. And surely any theory that seems to posit the United States as the only possible causal factor in contemporary history is leaving some very important things out of account. Yet, I would venture to say that the "blame America first" attitude is a necessary misrecognition -- a necessary part of the dialectic. The pull of nationalism, the indoctrination of the public school system and the popular media, is so incredibly strong that the only way to get beyond the "default" setting of tacitly regarding the United States as the Last Best Hope of Mankind (despite unfortunate accidents such as the Vietnam War) is to invert that picture completely.Surely afterward we can come to a place where we can say, "Yes, no matter what other motivations went into it, the Marshall Plan was an incredibly good thing," for example. And most likely, we will reach that point. But the only way to get there, effectively, is to go through the much-parodied Chomsky route in which America is apparently the cause of all the world's woes -- because otherwise, every single example of American misdeeds is going to be dismissed as an accident that does not effect the liberatory and salvific essence of Americanness. The proper way to critique the "blame America first" attitude is by having gone through it, not by standing near the doorway, glancing inside, and slamming it shut due to an instinctive "no." That instinctive "no" is, finally, much more dangerous than a naive Chomskyism.
