Todd Gitlin: This Manichaean Moment
[Todd Gitlin’s latest book (with Liel Leibovitz), The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election has just been published by Simon & Schuster.]
America inclines to wars of the rhetorical absolute. Adversaries readily turn into menaces; menaces into irresistible blobs and imminent devastations. Fights burst into wars and wars are declared holy. As the nation strives to protect itself from actually existing enemies, the Manichaean strain in American life packages them into the Enemy to End All Enemies.
The enemy, like the monotheist’s God, is single and omnipresent. Behind every jihadi with a rocket grenade launcher stands Stalin and Hitler. Once again, everything is said—shrieked—to be at stake. All-or-nothing minds crowd the center of what is sometimes too respectfully called “the national conversation.” And sometimes the center does not hold.
We are not the only nation that has been drawn to the apocalyptic mood, God knows, but it is a leitmotif to which we return as if to primordial ooze. America was, after all, a promised land from before its inception. Before the English settlers had spied the Massachusetts coast, they knew it to be the yet unseen site of a “new Israel.” When they discovered the land was already occupied, they wrestled with the question of how to come to terms with that inconvenient fact. Not all their reactions were extreme, but extremes were always a live option.
It wasn’t sufficient that there must be war against a European empire; there must be war to end war. It wasn’t sufficient to contain the evil system of Soviet communism; at all costs, communism everywhere must be expunged everywhere. The Japanese were not only aggressors, they had to be imagined as subhuman.
The very extravagance of these hysterias is partly a function, paradoxically, of the private enthusiasms that absorb us. Over the past century, America has become rather less Spartan than epicurean. We are not exactly peaceable, but most times, we’d rather not rouse ourselves for a cause. It’s as if a usually inattentive public can only be galvanized with all-or-nothing rhetoric.
So, after 1989, the meltdown of the cold war was a disaster for the apocalyptic imagination. The enemy not only succumbed, he disbanded. There was a hole left in the heart of the ideological theater—Hamlet with a void where Claudius used to be, Iago written out of Othello. Not only that, but inconclusive wars became the norm. It is not altogether surprising that now, despite George W. Bush’s finest rhetorical efforts (I am not being sarcastic) to distinguish between Al Qaeda and Islam tout court, Islam has emerged as the (im)moral equivalent of communism...
Read entire article at New Republic
America inclines to wars of the rhetorical absolute. Adversaries readily turn into menaces; menaces into irresistible blobs and imminent devastations. Fights burst into wars and wars are declared holy. As the nation strives to protect itself from actually existing enemies, the Manichaean strain in American life packages them into the Enemy to End All Enemies.
The enemy, like the monotheist’s God, is single and omnipresent. Behind every jihadi with a rocket grenade launcher stands Stalin and Hitler. Once again, everything is said—shrieked—to be at stake. All-or-nothing minds crowd the center of what is sometimes too respectfully called “the national conversation.” And sometimes the center does not hold.
We are not the only nation that has been drawn to the apocalyptic mood, God knows, but it is a leitmotif to which we return as if to primordial ooze. America was, after all, a promised land from before its inception. Before the English settlers had spied the Massachusetts coast, they knew it to be the yet unseen site of a “new Israel.” When they discovered the land was already occupied, they wrestled with the question of how to come to terms with that inconvenient fact. Not all their reactions were extreme, but extremes were always a live option.
It wasn’t sufficient that there must be war against a European empire; there must be war to end war. It wasn’t sufficient to contain the evil system of Soviet communism; at all costs, communism everywhere must be expunged everywhere. The Japanese were not only aggressors, they had to be imagined as subhuman.
The very extravagance of these hysterias is partly a function, paradoxically, of the private enthusiasms that absorb us. Over the past century, America has become rather less Spartan than epicurean. We are not exactly peaceable, but most times, we’d rather not rouse ourselves for a cause. It’s as if a usually inattentive public can only be galvanized with all-or-nothing rhetoric.
So, after 1989, the meltdown of the cold war was a disaster for the apocalyptic imagination. The enemy not only succumbed, he disbanded. There was a hole left in the heart of the ideological theater—Hamlet with a void where Claudius used to be, Iago written out of Othello. Not only that, but inconclusive wars became the norm. It is not altogether surprising that now, despite George W. Bush’s finest rhetorical efforts (I am not being sarcastic) to distinguish between Al Qaeda and Islam tout court, Islam has emerged as the (im)moral equivalent of communism...