A Nation With No Soul Pays Dearly

The emperor has no clothes. The events of 9/11 exposed a terrible truth: As a nation, we have no soul.

The nation’s struggle with the war on terror and the partisan political bickering that has reached hysterical proportions, is the result of a few fundamental truths, not the least of which is that as a nation, we cannot and will not define what it is to be an American and what it is we stand for.

That moral vacuum is being exploited, of course. There are a significant number of people who believe the American government had a hand in the catastrophe and there are an even greater number of people that believe that any kind of moral clarity actually impedes and handicaps our nation’s policies.

No nation, society or culture can survive without moral clarity. That is true in no small measure because no individual can survive without moral clarity.

In order to find moral clarity, nations and individuals must have insight.

Dr Sanity once noted,

There is an inner courage required to look at one’s self in the mirror of insight and truly know the person looking back. All of us are capable of the most horrible behavior; just as we are capable of finding ways to rationalize it and cover it up or blame others for it. Psychological health requires that we look into that mirror frequently and understand our own motivations and behaviors and not flinch in recognizing the truth about ourselves.

Without insight, she notes that

…individuals and societies go off careening off in all the wrong directions–directions that will never lead to the recognition or acceptance of reality, and so can never lead to effective solutions.

It does take courage to look into oneself or a nation’s psyche, because, inevitably, imperfections are made clear and the need for change becomes not only evident, but pressing.

Aldous Huxley noted that “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

As a nation, we have reached a point where many would sooner believe absurd conspiracy theories or flights of fancy, rather than face the facts that would upend their perceptions of what reality must be, so as to validate their beliefs and biases. In other words, make the facts fit to support bias and even outright hate- no matter how many lies, distortions or reinterpretations of reality there needs to be.

The mythology must be dispelled- we are not all equal. Aldous Huxley, once more:

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

There is a difference between those who value freedom versus those who would destroy freedom. There is a difference between those who would defend freedom, versus those who would defend those who wish to kill freedom. There is no moral equivalence between the two, no matter how desperately those who would destroy need there to be such a thing. They seek that equivalence because in truth, they are ashamed of themselves and they are ashamed at their own lack of morality.

Those who thought the events of 9/11 would galvanize and unite a nation were sadly mistaken. Instead, the events of that day only served to sever that which was barely held together, the notion that we are indeed, ‘one nation,’ has been dispelled. We have ceased to be one nation and ‘E Pluribus Unum‘ has become a faded memory.

Since that time, hate in the form of anti Semitism has become mainstream and leaders are openly compared to the most vicious and evil of leaders. In what is an example of surrealism come to life, those who so openly hate, profess to be the standard bearers of freedom- and legions of Americans applaud. The absurd has become reality.

GK Chesterton once noted that

All conservatism, is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change.

It is the left that have deliberately adopted a ‘conservative’ position by failing to proactively address matters that are of great consequence to us all. They have come to parrot the absurdities, hate and disgust for freedom of those whose agenda they have adopted.

The left have become a part of a netherworld, replete with conspiracy theories and visceral hatred, and the justification of the most heinous of violence. They demand rights without addressing and acknowledging obligations and they have little tolerance for those with different ideas. Calling for the death of an opponent has become acceptable and violence is only another form of acceptable political expression- and there is barely a ripple of concern. Civilized debate has become a thing of the past, replaced with name calling and even more calls for the destruction of political or ideological adversaries. Many see the world through very colored lenses.

Shrinkwrapped notes a simple truth:

Most of us start with our own circumstances. If we personally are doing well, and feeling optimistic about our own lives, then the World will tend to reflect that, on balance. Alternately, if our personal circumstances are parlous, the World will appear to be a grimmer place. The tendency to see a greater or lesser reflection of one’s inner state in the outside world is an aspect of “externalization”, which is the defensive maneuver by which a person removes the locus of distress from the inner world to the outer world.

Shrinkwrapped’s words offer clarity and exquisite insight. If we see our own lives with moral insight, we see and judge the world in the same way. If we are endowed with a certain morality, we will not confuse that with immorality- and we will not allow immorality to be regarded as ‘equal.’

American values are not about shared political beliefs or shared ideologies. American values are about a shared morality- that freedom and equality are the DNA that we share and courses through our blood. Those who would deprive us of freedom are not equals and those who would hate are not equals, either.

Neo-neocon quotes FDR

… “only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” I happen to think the Left fits the definition of “foolish optimist” in denying the dark realities of the present-day Islamist totalitarian threat. The Left, of course, thinks people such as myself to be foolish optimists in denying the dark realities of the threats posed by the would-be dictators Bush and Rove, and that we are timid and cowering fraidy cats in assuming that people such as Ahmadinejad mean exactly and precisely what they say.

We will win the war on terror and the left of this generation, will be forgotten, because in the end, history teaches society progresses and forges ahead. The cost of that progress and of the victory to a nation that has lost it’s soul will be unnecessarily high if we do not regain our footing.

That footing can come in many forms. The Anchoress, in a conversation with her son, poignantly refers to an unmistakable Irish-American pride:

We talked about how the Irish - and the Scots - when they came to America, became cops, firefighters, railworkers and skyscraper builders, because those were the hardest, filthiest and most dangerous jobs, and no one else wanted them. Here in New York, and in Boston and other cities, these families almost developed dynasties within the lifesaving and protection professions - whole families entered into that service until to do anything else was almost unthinkable. In fact one of my Elder Son’s grade-school friends is doing that right now; he graduated high school, now he is finishing up his military service and hoping to get into the FDNY, like his father and his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, like his uncles and cousins.

Give The Anchoress another 20 minutes and she will write with the same great passion and pride, the stories of Italian, Greek, Jewish, Spanish and Chinese immigrants. Every single immigrant group have a similar story, told with pride, of the integration into American morality and the American mosaic. None of us would be who we are if we didn’t have that American DNA coursing through our bloodstream.

We are Americans. Our values were not forged in far away places, influenced by far away prejudices biases and hate.

We are Americans. We are better than that.

It isn’t as if we never had a purpose, of course- we did. As John Kennedy noted,

…Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself…

To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich…

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

As long as there is no national purpose or identity, there are no foundations upon which we can stand- and thus there is no nation to defend.

National purpose and identity are not found in fostering ‘diversity awareness’ or ‘cultural sensitivity’ programs. Those things are nice to have, important even, but they do not and cannot replace the need for a national identity and purpose- those are representative of moral values, deliberately and willingly shouldered.

That national purpose was stolen and spirited away, and when it was, our nation lost it’s soul. Much of America, the supposed inheritors of that classical liberalism embodied by John Kennedy, no longer will defend freedom. In fact, they have made a mockery of liberalism by embracing those who revel in hate, bigotry and terror and those who despise freedom and would slaughter those who ‘worship at the altar of freedom.’

On this day, soul searching is in order.