So fucking tired

[nancylebov]

NPR is interviewing an anti-torture guy from the ACLU, which is fine. Someone calls in to say that terrorists treat people really badly, so why should we do anything differently? The anti-torture guy says, "Because we're Americans."

I have this werid belief in universal values. I would like Americans to not torture because they have some respect for people and for truth and for the long run. I want Americans to behave decently because it's worth doing, not because it's a special American thing.

Comments

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I grew up with American exceptionalism. I was taught, and I think it's still true to some extent, that America was the only nation in the history of the world founded not on language, or ethnicity, but on an idea: the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. I think the point of answering questions like that, "Because we're Americans," is that it's shorthand for, "Because if we're not a nation of moral principles, then we're just another bunch of fancy-dress ethnic warlords like the people our founders rebelled against."

[madfilkentist]

Very nicely put. Saying "Because we're Americans" serves as a reminder that Americans should, by the principles under which the country was founded, abjure torture. Sure, America has repeatedly veered far from those principles. But there have always been people holding them up, pointing out that the deviation betrays the things that keep the country from going down the tubes. It has made a difference. I don't think there's any other country where the statement "It's unconstitutional" or the local equivalent is so damning an indictment.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

All true, but after over 200 years, American is an ethnicity (or a complex of somewhat similar ethnicities) at least as much as it's an idea.

And there's a difficulty with saying "We're special because we're the only ones who believe in universal rights".

[madfilkentist]

I don't see "the only ones" as being part of that statement.

Any organized group of people should be entitled to appeal to the best of its traditions or founding principles. Group pride is a dangerous thing, and I think that's part of what you have in mind, since it can lead to thinking, "We're good because we're us." But it's also a legitimate tool for reminding people of what they have to live up to.

The right answer to a difficult ethical question is always long, and involves responding to a lot of counter-arguments. But people respond to concrete images which embody a broad set of principles. That means that not only is the simplified term useful for persuasion, it's important to keep it attached to those principles. If the politicians promoting war and torture are the only ones making statements about what "being American" means, then being American will mean being pro-war and pro-torture. Remember the "America -- love it or leave it" slogan during the Vietnam war, which really meant, "Love the war or leave America."

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

"We're special because we're the only ones who believe in universal rights"

Not "the only ones". But substitute "at the forefront of the group" and it works for me; the US Constitution is now one of the oldest founding national documents, and certainly one of the first to establish broad rights (as opposed to, say, the Magna Carta, whose rights grants specifically excluded large segments of the populace).

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You're special because you were ahead of the field on granting rights two hundred odd years ago?

It does rather demand that someone ask what have you done for rights lately?

It's 2005. The "we're the land of the free and you all suck" rhetoric is getting really painful to hear. Living in other free countries with human rights all my life, I had no idea how much I'd bought that American exceptionalist rhetoric until the 2000 election, when it seemed to me so much worse that it had happened in America, "forefront of the group" of the free, than anywhere else. I was genuinely shocked to find out that counting votes wasn't something axiomatic for you the way it was in the democratic countries where I have lived. And now you're torturing people, and you want to fingerprint me if I visit, and give foreign visitors no civil rights at all?

Better than Syria, yes, but can you really claim to be "in the forefront of the group" of a world that includes Canada and Denmark?

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

You're special because you were ahead of the field on granting rights two hundred odd years ago?

No, I phrased what I said poorly.

What I meant was, having established the granting of rights across classes, and carried it on in several correct (if too long delayed) steps later, we ought to continue to bear ourselves according to those principles, and to extend them.

I'd like to think I work towards that comportment on a personal level, and wish we could, as a nation, establish that among our fundamental values.

Hope this is clearer.