Waterston on America

The actor Sam Waterston, whose parts have ranged from the whiny and self-righteous liberal New York Times columnist Sidney Schanberg in The Killing Fields, to the whiny and self-righteous liberal Manhattan D.A. Jack McCoy in Law and Order, delivered a speech to new American citizens at a swearing-in ceremony this past July 4th at Monticello. Waterston’s vision of the country that those new citizens are joining is every bit as subversive as you would expect, though Waterston would of course see it as very patriotic. Yes, the speech is patriotic, but it is patriotic only to the universal liberal idea of America, not to America the actual country, political system, and people. Waterston says, among other obnoxious things, that America is “a contract among individuals around an idea.” Wow. For Sam W., America is even less substantive than, say, a business corporation. At least a business corporation has a legal personality. But, as Waterston sees it, America doesn’t even have a legal personality, let alone a cultural personality or a national identity. It’s just a contract to believe in an idea.

Waterston continues:

The United States may seem like a fixed star, but it isn’t. It is a relationship between citizens and an idea, and, like all relationships, it changes with the people in it. Its past is always up for reargument; its present is constantly unfolding, complex, a continuum of surprises, and the future is yet to be written.

This shows how right-liberalism, the belief that what forms America is adherence to a universal idea about human nature, turns insensibly into left-liberalism, the belief that America consists simply of unqualified openness to other humans, regardless of who those other humans are and what they believe, and thus that America has no substance of its own and no permanence. Yet left-liberals somehow expect that even though America must keep changing, as a result of the peoples and cultures and religions (including Islam) that keep entering it, the freedom and equality and openness that define America will not change. Liberals are vicious parasites who take the actual existence of their country for granted, even as they give all their loyalty to an ideal of openness that must destroy their country.

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Mike K. writes from Atlanta:

Waterston’s liberal view that America is nothing more than a contract to believe in an idea certainly would explain why liberals do not push for assimilation. In their view there is nothing to assimilate into. Proves your point that their country does not really exist for them in any real context. Liberals do seem to view many things through a legalistic filter.

Thucydides writes:

You have put your finger on the obsessive human universalism held by liberals of all stripes. Understanding its source is important. It derives most immediately from the Rousseauan Enlightenment view that men are in essence good and rational, or at least such blank slates as to be amenable through proper education to become such. It also has its classical antecedents, for example in Plato’s belief that men would always choose the good if only they had knowledge. It plays a strong role in the religious tradition growing out of the idea that God’s creation must be good.

The Pelagian heresy (Pelagius was a 5th century British monk) rejects the idea of original sin. Augustine, following the dominant classical tradition that recognized man’s tragic state and his flawed nature, stood in opposition to such naive optimism.

Even such an Enlightenment liberal as Kant knew the truth about the human condition: he said that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made.”

If it is believed that all men are in essence good (rather than a perplexing mixture of propensities for both good and evil, as is recognized in doctrines of original sin), then of course they must be morally equal. If all evil is purely caused by external influences, then the thing to do is work on the influences, and reform society. Liberal human universalism naturally leads to the liberal obsession with equality and hatred of hierarchy or subordination in society. It is also behind liberal meliorism, or the idea that we can through our own efforts work a rational remodeling of society. After all, if human beings are perfectly good and reasonable, why not?

This is the core of liberal faith, and it is a faith; a sentimental falsification of reality that leads inevitably to bad policy because it is at war with the tragic reality of the human condition. Why can’t liberals face the reality about our condition? My guess is that when it is no longer believed that there is any ultimate moral order to the universe, facing the reality about the inherent human potentiality for evil is too frightening for people who have given up God, but not the need for consolation that religion once provided.

LA replies:

Thucydides has added a new twist to the truism that liberalism is Christianity without God. How does liberalism replace the God it has toppled? With the inherent equal goodness of all humans.

This is also a new and interesting way of stating my oft-stated idea that once men reject God, so that there is nothing higher than the human self, all human selves are equal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 13, 2007 12:45 PM | Send