American Messianism

Introduction

Americans have a tendency to assume that their opponents are evil.  Bond films and Hollywood blockbusters instantiate, in the final analysis, what is already the common American assumption. It is not simply a matter of America’s opponents doing something bad. The situation is far more dire than that.  The opponent wishes to do evil, because their very will is oriented in that direction.  Given such an assumption, it follows quite naturally that neither diplomacy nor compromise can be considered realistic options. How can one compromise with evil?  The only possible response is to wage a war – perhaps a messianic war – against the enemy of the moment.  

The most recent consequence of this long-standing pattern is America’s intractable and constantly escalating proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.  From the perspective that matters in Washington, the reasons for this war are uncomplicated, having to do with the evil will of the Russian president, who, it is said, initiated a war on his neighbor, wholly unprovoked, in the usual Bond villain pattern. Still today, no compromise is being considered, nor is any diplomacy underway. Quite to the contrary, what we have seen, since the war began, is a constant escalation in the lethality of weapons supplied to Ukraine, and in the risks the US side is willing to take in its unprecedented direct confrontation with the Russian nuclear superpower.   

The result is a strange paradox:  on the one hand, we are confronted with a war which, as any responsible analyst will admit, could easily have been prevented altogether, by the simple expedient of allowing Ukraine to remain neutral. It is also a war that could have almost immediately been stopped, back in March/April 2022, after negotiations between Kiev and Moscow reached a successful compromise in Istanbul – a compromise which the Americans, making use of the good offices of British foreign minister Boris Johnson, saw fit to reject. The upshot of this process, then, is that, for the sake of avoiding a neutral Ukraine, the world now faces the very real risk of a further escalation that could easily end in nuclear war.  

How did we get into such a thoroughly irrational position, which seemingly has reached a dead end?  We have gotten here by viewing reality through the prism of moralism, through the assumptions, just described, that those who oppose us must be motivated by an evil will.  It goes without saying that this moralizing pattern of thought (the word ‘thought’ is being used here in a purely metaphorical sense) nearly always involves a complete distortion of reality.  

The dire consequences of these habitual assumptions make obvious the need for a different approach, one that is both less moralistic and more adequate to reality.  Fortunately, such a perspective exists, and has existed for almost as long as philosophy itself. In the Platonic (Socratic) philosophical tradition, as anyone can see from reading, for example, the dialogue Gorgias or The Republic, the greatest danger we face in our political community is viewed not as the ‘bad will’ of the enemy, but ignorance and illusion, which may exist and usually does exist on all sides.  From Socrates’ perspective, all desire is oriented to what is believed to be the good, even if irrationality, or failure to understand the true needs of the soul, often leads us astray. 

The Platonic tradition, to be sure, does not deny the reality of evil. After all, a stubborn persistence in ignorance and illusion is also a form of evil. All the same, the Platonic perspective allows for a far more subtle understanding of the problem of evil.  “When we do evil,” noted the Christian Platonist Simone Weil, “we do not know it, because evil flees from the light.” The avoidance of thought is the typical form taken by this ‘fleeing from the light.’ Continuing on this same theme, Weil adds: “When we are the victims of an illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.”  

“When we are the victims of an illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil but as a necessity or even a duty.   

Messianism: General Considerations

Normally we think of messianism as a proselytizing mania conducted by those who are certain that God is on their side.  The key to any messianism, however, is not the presence of the Absolute, but the conviction that what one values is absolute.  This conviction can be, and regularly is, based on some such value as ‘development,’ or ‘return on investment’ or ‘democracy.’  Hans Morgenthau, in his outline of the four cardinal rules of diplomacy, places in first place the need to banish “the crusading spirit” — another name for messianism.  The ideal vehicle for such a crusading spirit is what Morgenthau refers to as abstract principles, or some suitable ‘catchword’, which is then molded and adapted to suit the needs of the moment. There is no problem with the meaning of the catchword being twisted into variously-shaped pretzels in the process.  That is the beauty of the abstract principle or catchword in the first place. Its very vagueness lends its owners an ever-expanding freedom and power.  Or so it appears at first.  And yet, as Morgenthau notes, citing William Graham Sumner: “If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, the arbiter of your destiny.”  

Democracy today serves as just such a catchword for the American political class, and it has, correspondingly, generated its own species of messianism, that of democracy promotion.  Freedom is another such catchword.  Now, true freedom is, to be sure, among the greatest of values. It becomes a catchword when the meaning of freedom is distorted and misunderstood, as it has in our time, generating thereby freedom as ideology, freedom as a generator of the crusading spirit, of messianism.  We will return below to the crucial question of freedom. 

An additional form of messianism, perhaps the most obvious of all, is the quest to eliminate evil from the world. The American-led Global War on Terror was just such an effort. So too was the communist effort to eliminate from the world all capitalists, thereby supposedly ushering in a secular heaven within history.  

American Messianism

According to Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1921 – 1983), the American Protestant spirit has a strong tendency toward sectarianism, and this is a direct result of its rejection of the sacramental order, in other words, its rejection of the religious nature of creation itself.  Inhabiting this de-sacramentalized world are individual believers “obsessed with salvation,” but now their salvation can no longer be rooted in a relationship with the world or with the kingdom of heaven. As a result, a ‘salvation’ so conceived becomes an empty thing, shorn of content—and in this respect, as we will see, it echoes the liberal concept of freedom. At the same time, even a salvation so conceived must find some content, some justification; and so, the “experience of ‘being saved’… is unavoidably filled with any content. The one who is saved must ‘save.’ ” All the activity and all the excitement of life becomes a process of ‘saving,’ a process of struggling against various evils, whatever they happen to be (communism, populism, drugs, and most recently of course, Vladimir Putin). Without an evil to do battle against, there is literally nothing else to do; there is no substance, there are no ‘things’ which warrant loving and valuing for their own sake.   

Freedom from Roots

Schmemann’s perspective on the sectarian origins of American messianism bears a close resemblance to, and provides an added dimension, to Simone Weil’s famous dictum that “whoever is uprooted himself, uproots others” (cf. ‘those who are saved must save’).  Weil’s concept of being rooted overlaps in certain respects with Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit in as much as both presuppose a substantive complex of inherited moral and practical traditions as well as orientations to various ‘treasures’ which must be passed on to the future.  In a rooted community, work (labor) itself is a continuation of the liturgical side of life – or, to use a vocabulary more typical of Weil, labor becomes an expression within the world of the beauty and goodness ‘which lies beyond this world.’  

The process of emptying the world of rich content of this sort is nailed in place, is made all but irretrievable, by the peculiar liberal (mis)understanding of freedom.  American theologian and philosopher D.C. Schindler has, over the course of several books and numerous articles, carefully diagnosed where the liberal concept of freedom, which has been embraced from the beginning by the United States, goes astray. To vastly oversimplify, what D.C. Schindler has outlined is the process whereby the proper meaning of freedom has been narrowed to the point where it amounts to nothing more than a process of willing, a process of choosing; in the final analysis, the reduction of freedom to the possession of a power, full stop. 

…the proper meaning of freedom has been narrowed to the point where it amounts to nothing more than a process of willing, a process of choosing; in the final analysis, the reduction of freedom to the possession of a power, full stop. 

A freedom so understood uproots the whole world.  It is helpful to contrast this innovation with the traditional view of freedom, which Schindler terms ‘symbolical’: 

To say that the will terminates in things – that is, in actual goods outside the soul – is to conceive of freedom in essentially symbolical terms as a ‘joining with,’ a sharing in goodness, by uniting with a reality that evokes desire and at the very same time responsibility. To deny this, as Locke came to see that he must, is to deny that the will connects with reality in any genuine sense; it is to lock the will within its own boundaries, to replace the ontological union of the soul and reality with the power to carry out an activity …  

Modern freedom creates a world that is strangely empty, even as it becomes ever more filled with stuff.  And as we have seen, idle hands become the devil’s playground. 

Conclusion: The Good Will that Destroys Worlds

Paul Robinson, in his article for Landmarks critiquing the proposed new Containment policy, points out that Kiev’s extremely poor prospects for success, and the likelihood that continuing the war will lead to perhaps hundreds of thousands of additional deaths, doesn’t seem to bother ‘the new Cold War’ enthusiasts: 

Convinced that they are ‘helping’ Ukraine, they lead it further into the abyss, just as their predecessors led Vietnamese, Afghans, Angolans, and others into the abyss in decades past … Looking at this from a philosophical point of view, one might complain that the issue here is a failure to follow Kant’s categorical imperative and to view people as ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. The end is weakening Russia and China, and if others suffer in the process, we shrug our shoulders and consider it a price worth paying, knowing full well that it is not us but others who are paying the price. I think, though, that this complaint is not entirely accurate because the architects of these policies strike me not so much as cynics who know full well what they are doing but as true believers, who really imagine that their ‘help’ is in fact help, that the United States is a force for good in the world, and that spreading its influence and undermining that of others is thus for the benefit of all humanity.

What is striking here is the chasm between the declared aims — ‘helping this or that other nation’ — and the visibly disastrous effects of that ‘help.’ What is being offered, it is said, and if Paul Robinson is right, is being offered in the sincere belief that what is being offered is something good, is variously termed ‘freedom’ or ‘human rights’ or ‘democratic values.’ What is actually being delivered to Ukraine, as in the other countries he mentioned (and his was a very abbreviated list), is national dismemberment, death on an unimaginable scale (50% of Ukrainians today are said to be suffering from PTSD – the ones who are still alive, of course).  What I am trying to draw attention to here is a certain aspect of the psychology of modern liberalism: there is something here that is so pathologically self-absorbed that its notions of the good are incapable of noticing realities beyond its own ideological construct.

I want to close with an image that greatly impressed me, taken from a recent English novel that to my mind symbolizes the liberal uprooted consciousness. The novel in question, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, takes place in early 19^th century England. The England described therein has all the familiar realism of a Jane Austen novel, until two men with astonishing magical powers make their presence known. What drives the story forward are their efforts to counteract the efforts of yet another magical character, a powerful faerie, called the Man with Thistledown Hair. This faerie uses his power to ensnare and trap victims within his own world, a world which the Man with Thistledown Hair considers utterly delightful. This faerie takes a fancy to certain characters in the novel and sets about, with perfect sincerity, to ‘help’ them.  He demonstrates, like a good Kantian, a will completely dedicated to doing good, with the only problem being that the ‘goods’ that he bestows are only those that he himself defines. 

He demonstrates, like a good Kantian, a will completely dedicated to doing good, with the only problem being that the ‘goods’ that he bestows are only those that he himself defines.

It is not that he hears, but is indifferent to, the protests of his victims, who do not want any of these ‘gifts.’ What we have in the faerie is a degree of egotistical solipsism that has reached an infinite degree, such that he is simply incapable of noticing anything outside of his own interpretation of the world.  Spoken words that contradict his internal thoughts and wishes ‘to do good’ for others are, in the purely mechanical sense, ‘heard,’ and yet they might as well not be, in as much as they remain to the faerie utterly incomprehensible.  Only what is locked inside his own mind has any meaning for him. 

A Lindsay Graham, a Joe Biden, a Victoria Nuland, and, indeed, most of the liberal foreign policy establishment – an establishment which extends also to Europe –  strike me as analogues of the Man with Thistledown Hair.  As Paul Robinson said in respect to their efforts in such places as Vietnam, or Central America, or Libya, or Syria, or Ukraine, and now Georgia, in all such cases, they believe that they are doing good, that their help is actively desired. That they are saving the world.