Author Cormac McCarthy has Sheriff Bell say the following wise, terse thing in his book No Country for Old Men, “I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didn’t change.” For ages, the love of money as well as other tendencies, liabilities, and predilections have haunted America (like it has other countries, societies, empires). We are arguably in the last stage of the American-dominated world; author Fareed Zakaria titled his successful book The Post-American World (link). If true, it makes perfect sense that there would be certain undesirable results of a country that hopped on the capitalism/militarism train and rode it ’til it came off the tracks. As author David Callahan put it in his noteworthy book on cheating in American culture, “Certainly, many of the reforms needed to curb cheating will be harder to enact as long as the United States remains so deeply in the grips of laissez-faire ideology and market values continue to reign with such influence on our culture and our economy.”
And yet, despite all the criticism that America has earned in its checkered past—slavery, witch hunts, scarlet letters, Indian massacres, the stocks, nuclear bomb use, redlining, and tarring and feathering—to take a mere 1/5th of the possible examples—America has at times, and in ways, approached the vision of “the shining city on a hill” that animated our estimable (sort of) “forefathers.”
Incidentally, when the late leader of great intelligence and conscience Mario Cuomo responded to Ronald Reagan’s Panglossian speech that utilized the shining city on a hill metaphor, he said in part: “There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city. In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation—Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more A Tale of Two Cities than it is just a “Shining City on a Hill.” The reference to the Dickins novel was a way to illustrate that while America did go to the moon, experience notable prosperity, and see clear successes in education during the post-war era, it was also a time of major problems reminiscent of the London that Dickens knew.
I wish to ask a question about whether we Americans are virtuous—or, alternatively, vice-ridden, lazy, selfish, evil, immoral, and culpable. My curiosity was brought about by my watching a Firing Line with Margaret Hoover last night. In light of the interview Hoover conducted with Sara Botstein and Ken Burns, the co-directors of the recently-completed documentary film America and the Holocaust, I really do wonder about my country and my fellow citizens. I have to say that as somewhat of a moralist, I have been disappointed so many times by individuals—from presidents to parents to police officers—I have thought about this more than a few times over the years.
Regarding virtuous, I know it is a very broad term, and almost hazy to most people. On the one hand, as Ezra Klein writes, virtue can mean something as specific as the following: “We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.” So that is one view of what virtuous or non-virtuous behavior is about: a presence of good qualities, or an absence of them (or the opposite of “good qualities”).
In the following admittedly long quotation, modern philosopher Massimo Pigliucci points out:
Virtues are character traits. And a character trait is essentially a disposition to act in a certain way.…most people in the Western world, at least, if they hear the word virtue, they hear something stuffy and something that is clearly influenced by 2000 years of Christian tradition. They start thinking about purity and chastity and things like that. No, that’s not what we’re talking about. Those aren’t virtues. Those are part of some of the Christian virtues. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the Greco-Roman virtues.
The four fundamental ones are practical wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. Practical wisdom is the knowledge of what is really good and what is not good for you. So what should be your objectives, your goals, your priorities, things like that — is practical wisdom. Courage is the courage to do the right thing, even though it may cost you. Justice is what tells you what that right thing is. And typically, it boils down to behaving towards other people, the way in which you would like them to behave toward you. So with fairness, respect, etc. And then temperance is a matter of doing things in the right amount, neither too much nor too little.
For the purposes of this essay, let’s consider virtue to be synonymous with goodness, moral uprightness, and praiseworthy behavior. It’s the stuff you would include in your autobiography, rather than selectively exclude, as one crude yardstick.
Now, I’m not sure if I can say that Americans are any more virtuous, good, or praiseworthy that human beings in general, but nor can I confidently maintain we are more unvirtuous, morally repugnant, or condemnable than any others. I do however think that in our history we have been in a place to have plenty of opportunity to do both, and so we have done both. That is, we have successfully walked on the moon, and we have led, participated in, and unwittingly contributed to planet-wide degradation and are now nearing a climate catastrophe from which there might be no return. No one on Earth is more responsible for this planetary harm than we are—because we consume more beef, we build more houses, and we drive more cars than anyone else. With moral behavior, the questions always are: do we know what we have done and are doing that is bad? Do we care? And do we try to curb our behavior (without being absolutely forced to)? I believe the record shows Americans are pretty stubborn, inflexible, and egocentric.
There are many perspectives one can take in regard to Americans’ virtue/behavior/actions/record. Two caveats come up: one, some Americans are virtuous in the extreme—downright saintly individuals who care about all life and behave fastidiously rightly. Others, however, are low-down, dirty, selfish sons of bitches (here I am, channeling a character out of No Country for Old Men!). Americans are better and worse than the rest of the world, inf fact. And when you calculate a “mean level of virtuousness” Americans are probably about average on the whole. Maybe a bit worse.
Secondly, if we consider the parallax, the perspective one takes will determine what they see. That is, like beauty, truth is in the eye of the beholder (not “capital-T Truth“, which is of course independent of human eyes—but also very difficult to “pin down” (and perhaps impossible to prove). Thus, one can take any number of examples and call them evidence in favor of Americans being virtuous (by and large) or selfish, entitled and hypocritical. As Burns said in the interview about modern America:
We are still the nation of immigrants—even though we don’t believe in that. To me, it’s about the acceptance of using facts to tell complex stories in which a thing, and the opposite of a thing, could be true at the same time.
Burns goes on to share other aspects of the quintessential ethos of America as a whole—as exemplified in countless instances, acts, and periods in the long/short life of this country. Just as Germany is characterized by countless individuals—from Frederick II to Hitler, from Bach to Nietzsche, from Martin Luther to Beethoven, from Freud to Fromm, from Marx to Goebbels, from the brothers Grimm to Carl von Stauffenberg—America is also messy, complex, dubious, and ambiguous. Reflecting on America’s virtuous (or or lack thereof) actions, stances and attitudes during the Holocaust and World War II, Burns described our dual nature thusly:
With Franklin Roosevelt, you have someone who was disposed to help, and yet someone who was unable or unwilling (perhaps) to help; this is what I like: big, huge, complicated sagas in which nobody is perfect. And at the same time, out of that, in this film, are all the heroic individuals who sacrifice life and limb to save other human beings.
It’s worth pointing out that there were voices in the U.S. government who were decidedly anti-Semitic, isolationist, and unwise. Then, there were others such as Henry A. Wallace, one of the bright lights of the long, remarkable Roosevelt Administration. I wrote a blog or two about the terribly interesting and influential (and more progressive) vice-president under Roosevelt (here).
Filmmakers Botstein and Burns allude to some pretty seamy aspects of America’s history as a way to provide context to what the character of Americans is. Some aspects are Holocaust-relevant—the subject of their documentary, as it were—but others are merely in the backdrop of this country. Emma Lazarus penned a beautiful poem for the base of the Statue of Liberty (The New Colossus) indicating this was a country worth risking one’s life to immigrate to. Burns notes that:
We have turned the number “six million” into an opaque figure that means nothing. It is important (as we have tried to do in this film) to personalize and dissolve that opacity by making real the individuals. That’s the important thing about the Holocaust. And at that time, Americans cared or they didn’t care. But the important thing is to remove the opacity and make these [murdered Jews] an amputated limb which we still feel.
Wow that is eloquence and punch, right there! Americans are notorious indeed for going from one thing to another without really reflecting much, or remembering much. This has a way of functioning to reduce insight, guilt, and reckoning. I don’t think it would be wrong to call the typical American mindset, memory, and attention span one big defense mechanism (a la Sigmund Freud). Does anyone really think about Dylan Roof shooting black people in a church anymore? Who among us still laments that Trump decided to separate immigrant families at the border? And I shudder to think how many kids and adolescents from El Salvador sustained massive brain damage having witnessed atrocities and endured such privation…considering we played a significant role in the dysfunctional way Latin American countries developed. Indeed, as Chomsky has written, we played a role in bringing about the very crisis that plagues us now at the border (link)(link2)—not to mention the actual immorality and gall inherent in tinkering with foreign governments. Many of us over 50 remember the Iran-Contra Affair…. Indeed, the old-school Marine Smedley D. Butler famously said of his time in the military:
I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers … I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.
Anyway, back to the center. I remember being intrigued (perhaps inspired) by two Neil Diamond works when I was growing up: The Jazz Singer and America. Diamond’s live performance of America brought a tear to my eye a number of times—it’s that inspiring. Indeed, my father was the son of immigrants and he struck me as duly reverent about what this country offered him.
But he also was subjected to anti-Semitism on the streets of New York and Youngstown, and there are countless stories of immigrants who were among the “tired, weary, and poor” not being granted succor and hospitality after braving a long journey and having passed through Ellis Island (like my grandparents and their siblings). Millions of newly arrived immigrants in decades-past quickly encountered disappointment, dismay, and dystopia. In viewing the movie Gangs of New York, one gets the impression that the major cities of this country weren’t a place even worth immigrating to! (then, and unfortunately to some degree, now). Kind of the opposite of the ancient Greek concept of xenia. Point being, we have never been kind or compassionate with immigrants–surprising since 99% of Americans are descended from immigrants arriving in the years 1630-2000. We seem to have a bit of prejudice, too, about “the other”–be they “dirty” Jews, “damned Irish,” shifty “Chinamen”, “those brown people,” the poor, etc. Not very Christian, I must say….
Burns references Jews that were lost to history at the hands of Germans, yes, but also often excluded by most countries in the world (including the United States, and Canada): “I’m optimistic in that these stories all have, as broad relief, the positive things that we human being do—and still can do.” Thus, the film draws some eerie parallels between how America treated Jews and how we treat immigrants today (in the late 1930s and early 1940s, we accepted a mere 220,000 Jews [out of 6,000,000 who were slaughtered in the worst ways imaginable]; we even doctored our immigrant quotas to purposefully exclude Jews, etc., etc.).
Yes, yes there are currently many modern, serious problems going on south of the border. But it paints a pretty dark picture of the question about whether Americans are virtuous or not when one considers how utterly dysfunctional our immigration system is. And no, I realize we cannot be the immigration destination for millions of people every year! But think of the audacity of what some Republican governors did in late 2022 with some immigrants (link). There is no patriotism there, only showmanship and chicanery. This stunning example of buffoonery and playing to the cheap seats was a ham-handed, dark, obvious ploy to treat immigrants with great disrespect. Despite the inanity and offensiveness of the ploy, I would admit that there is somewhat of a geographical issue with how the nation encounters immigration problems.
Shaun King of Newsweek calls those jokers on the carpet when he writes:
For the life of me, I don’t know how Christian conservatives justify their repeated abuses and mistreatment of immigrants in America. At this very moment, nearly a hundred immigrant children who were forcefully separated from their parents at the border years ago by the Trump administration still have not been reunited with their families. It’s an unthinkable atrocity and about as cruel a human rights violation as you could ever have.
He is spot-on to highlight the hypocrisy of millions of so-called Christian Americans. This is the part that bothers me. Indeed, when one looks back on the mean-spiritedness and exclusivity and frankly, the anti-Semitism of most Christians in the 1940s, it is a very dark portrait of the so-called virtue of Americans. As Burns points out, the main reason that Roosevelt didn’t do more to bring the most downtrodden individuals in the world in the mid-1900s—the Jews—into the arms of Lady Liberty is that the American people weren’t having it.
It is clear that despite so much about America that is good, great, and worthy, we are despicable and repugnant at times. Think about the way we perpetrated genocide against Native Americans. For what? Land.
Consider how the country was founded on racism—slavery was legal since the beginning, and otherwise estimable statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slaveholders themselves. Slaves were only counted as three-fifths of a human being for the purposes of representation during the Constitutional Convention. Are you aware of how harrowing and brutal the cross-Atlantic voyages of slaves were? Have you watched 12 Years a Slave? Truly mind-blowing stuff when you think about the fact that this is America—supposedly the greatest country in the world.
Hell, the Civil War was fought over the question of whether Americans had the right to secede—and take their land, slaves, and crops with them when they left. Why? Slavery. Yes, the South was absolutely addicted to using human beings as slave labor, bred them to add to the number of slaves, and fought tooth and nail against its abolition. It’s noxious stuff to consider. Those Americans would have rather died than to give up owning other people for profit…
When you take together our anti-Semitism in the 20th century, our genocide in the 18th and 19th centuries, and our slavery in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, it leads to a very dark perspective on the question of whether Americans are virtuous. We’re starting at 100 steps behind the starting gate with just those three legacies!
And forget about reparations and apologies and such, that’s just out of the question in the minds of most white Americans. And did you know that America broke virtually every treaty it signed with Native American tribes? Talk about immoral acts… Indeed, if such moral transgressions were relegated to our past, it would be a bit easier to stomach. But Americans are very, very loathe to accept truth, or engage in reconciliation. We have gone maybe 1/10th as far as South Africa has with its post-apartheid efforts toward truth and reconciliation.
Do you remember Emmett Till? Have you heard Billie Holliday’s song Strange Fruit? Did you notice the brouhaha about Colin Kaepernick protesting the ostensibly sterling character of America in recent years by not standing for the National Anthem? Consider what Trumpism has shown America about America (link). It’s enough to make one bow one’s head in sorrow and shame—if one is willing to “go there.” As Pew Research writes in the above-referenced link,
“Many questions about Trump’s legacy and his role in the nation’s political future will take time to answer. But some takeaways from his presidency are already clear from Pew Research Center’s studies in recent years. In this essay, we take a closer look at a few of the key societal shifts that accelerated – or emerged for the first time – during the tenure of the 45th president.”
I would say we have made very little moral progress since 2016. Hell, Clarence Thomas telegraphed that revoking some civil rights for gay Americans is now on the table! (just as abortion rights for women is under great threat now). That is ugly stuff.
Add to the ignominious list of American’s lack of virtuous character:
- the Tuskegee experiments
- Solomon Ash’s obedience to authority experiments
- the Ku Klux Klan/Jim Crow/Civil Rights Era outrages
- the stuff The Grapes of Wrath, Birth of a Nation, The Jungle, 12 Angry Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird popularized about the 20th century
- women being second-class citizens for a hell of a long time
- the number of sex-trafficked women in the 21st century
- the firebombing of Dresden and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- Trump and a thousand miscreants/traitors trying to overthrow the United States in 2021
- smallpox infested blankets and the Trail of Tears and the deplorable state of reservations
- book banning and voter suppression in recent months
….and it can leave an American downright ashamed and depressed.
Burns said that just like the time to prevent a genocide is before it happens (a quote), “the time to save a democracy is before it’s lost.”
I will say that the following quotation by New York Times opinion writer and author David Brooks is absolutely scintillating, and since I found it after I wrote this blog, I was very excited he and I are in such agreement! He said during a commencement speech at the University of Chicago (link):
Sometimes, I think the whole disaster with the Trump presidency is because of a breakdown in intellectual virtue, in America’s inability to face evidence clearly, and to pay due respect to the concrete contours of reality. These intellectual virtues may seem elitist, but once a country tolerates dishonesty, incuriosity, and intellectual laziness, everything else falls apart.
So I don’t want to be dour here. I am aware that alongside all of the many outrages, embarrassments, and ethical lapses committed by America’s leaders and people in the past, America is also a pretty special place. There are many things we can be rightfully proud of and which indicate that, in ways, we are virtuous (and conservatives are obsessed with this, of course, because they love to extol the virtues of Americans and “the American experiment” and American exceptionalism). Two sources are (link) and (link2).
Unfortunately, the idea of “American exceptionalism” is fraught with difficulty (link)(link2). It is as though we delude ourselves into believing we are special, above reproach, and God-graced because it shores up the shame that most self-aware, honest, educated Americans no doubt feel (if only subconsciously). Further, nationalism and Christian nationalism are on the rise, and very alarming (link)(link2)(link3). Indeed, Stephen M. Walt said, “The idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous may be comforting to Americans. Too bad it’s not true.”
So, in the end, to answer the question about whether Americans are virtuous or the opposite of virtuous, I would say: the answer is complicated. We are everything at once: our past is marred by scandal, moral outrage, ethical outrages, and all manner of bad behavior—individually as citizens, and collectively as a nation. And yet, that dark side doesn’t fairly sum us up as a people. We are at once lazy, despicable, selfish as well as charitable, well-intentioned, helpful, prosocial, compassionate, and high-minded. We love our pets like no one else—but we torture more animals that anyone who was truly aware would be able to stomach (link).
Bill Maher tends to capture this dualism pretty well on his show—we are great and have amazing qualities, and we also fuck shit up repeatedly. We don’t seem to learn very well, and don’t seem to care much what others say about us (or what our record objectively shows). We have, as Lincoln put it, “better angels,” true. But then again, Lincoln was a sensitive and thoughtful witness to some of the lowest depravity and shameful chapters America has ever experienced.
He fought tooth and nail to both keep the Union together and to free slaves from the Southern States. But he was an exemplar of the seamy side of America, as well (link). He lived an amazing life that he had a right to be proud of, and he fell short of his better angels at times. The fact that Lincoln was snuck up on and shot in the head while trying to get a respite from his arduous daily tasks for an hour-and-a-half by an obsessed Confederate gunman who shouted, “death to tyrants!” when he proudly ended that man is oh so telling. So it goes, as is said.
At the end of the Constitutional Convention, participant and “Founding Father” Benjamin Franklin was asked by an interested onlooker to the proceedings: “Do we have a monarchy or a republic?” He answered, A republic, madam, if you can keep it.
Burns says this about America being “on a knife edge,” as Tolkien put it when referring to the great struggle for goodness, life, peace, and prosperity in his famous novel. Indeed, Burns is referring to the very soul of America, which, as of this writing, is very much in limbo:
Through more than 245 years, we have been able—in the midst of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil War—to keep those institutions alive and functioning. That is, we’ve had the peaceful transfer of power; we’ve had free and fair elections; we’ve had respect for institutions; the courts have remained independent (for the most part). But right now, I think we’re in our fourth great crisis, and the institutions that have been the bulwark of the success of our democracy and the peaceful transfer of power are all under assault.
In sum, America’s record is very dubious and as-yet-unclear, morally speaking. Though we have an immense pool of goodness, compassion, and neighborly concern (evident especially during natural disasters), we are pressing our luck as, let’s face it: more natural disasters are on their way! We have some flagging and decrepit institutions that are in need of a serious rehab. Some right-wing Americans are now just totally out to lunch. And well-armed… And some hard-core progressives are worried about minutiae or arming themselves.
Some consider us an empire in decline, and note that the more we engage in immoral and self-serving behavior as a nation (and of course, individually), the more tenuous our very existence becomes. True, China and Russia are nuclear-armed, tyrannical, and dangerous, and something such as morality might seem quaint or unimportant in comparison. But I think it is true that America can only stand so much cheating, corner-cutting, egocentrism, tragedies, aggression, institutional decay, and exceptionalistic thinking before (as Malcolm X so prophetically said), “the chickens [come] home to roost.” Indeed, I think that Burns is right to have said the following:
I think [now] is the greatest threat to our republic ever. Not the Depression, not World War II, not the Civil War. This is it. This moment of all these intersecting viruses, of novel coronaviruses and of racial injustice—[a] 403-year-old-virus. And it’s an age-old human virus of lying and misinformation and paranoia and conspiracy. This is the pill that will kill us unless we do something.
Here are some additional quotes about virtuous behavior—or the lack thereof—for your consideration:
“The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. It is the great challenge to which all of our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our country, our history, our experiment, then we forget who we are, and we make the great rift deeper and wider.” ~ Ken Burns
“What a great statesman must be most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens; namely, a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.”
“Democrats—and moderate Republicans—now have woken up and found ourselves in an America ruled by people pushing forward intolerant, discriminatory policies—anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-civil-liberties—all in the name of God.”
“What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.” ~ Barbara Jordan
“After Sept. 11 we were led to believe that America still stood for a vision that once inspired the world. We were deceived. After five years it’s no longer credible to say America has a higher moral purpose than terrorists when American occupation in Iraq fibrillates the country into a permanent state of war, and a static presence risks doing the same to Afghanistan.”
“America believes in a thing called Truth. She does not believe that we are entitled to our own alternate facts. She recoils at those who spread pernicious falsehoods. There is nothing more corrosive to a democracy than the idea that there is no truth. America also believes that there is a difference between right and wrong, and right matters. But there is more: truth matters, justice matters, but there is also decency. Decency matters.”
“Those who would be free must be virtuous.”
“…America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents.”
“In the 1960s, America faced a moral crisis that threatened to tear the country apart. Once we understood that there was no way to end the crisis without dismantling racism, we took steps to do so. As we enter the twenty-first century, a moral looms that could become equally grave. Our political institutions, both national and international, are rife with rankism.”
“Virtue ethics goes beyond pure duty and pure rights-based ethics. It is a direct challenge to the individual to rise above ordinary moral demands and to work toward creating a society in which it is easy for everyone to be virtuous and enjoy the good life.”
“Americans cannot naively espouse ideals that their own historic actions refute. Failure to come to terms with broken treaties and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of people undermines our moral authority.”
“The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control.”
“In the mid-1940’s, shortly after WWII, the newly formed United Nations met to establish one of the most important charters in world history: the Nuremberg Principles. The Nuremberg Principles were a set of guidelines aimed to prevent the cruelty and desolation wreaked by fascist Europe and Japan from ever happening again. Every corner of the globe was to resist brutality inflicted on innocent people. But now, in 2018, Donald Trump and his administration have given a cold shoulder to these principles and pursued a dark and twisted path, the like of which most Americans never would have dreamed of: internment facilities for migrant children.”
“America is an empire in decay. But we don’t have to lash out and do damage on the way down. We can reverse some of the damage we’ve done. It’s possible.”
“I did not clap during President Trump’s State of the Union address. …That’s not because I’m rooting against America. It’s because I’m rooting for it — and believe that we deserve better than a leader who uses language as sloppily and poisonously as Trump does, who reacts to every unwelcome message by smearing the messenger, and whose litmus test for patriotism is this and this alone: Do you worship me?”
“Distrust is at record levels in America today. It is the cancer eating away at our relationships, our politics and our society. And I have to admit a lot of this distrust is earned distrust. People feel betrayed because they have been betrayed. But distrust breeds distrust. When somebody is distrusting of me, I am distrusting toward them and we spiral into a distrust doom loop. That is the state we are in now. This is how nations fail, families fail, organizations fail.” ~ David Brooks
More quotes about virtuous, moral, and righteous can be found for free at this link.