War, society and the American soul

In some respects, the news from North Korea is an expression of a larger problem. To be sure, there are grave nuclear issues surrounding Iran, and the situation in Iraq has little chance of meaningful improvement.

The "larger problem" that we face is also one without any tangible boundaries, but there the resemblance ends. Every society, noted Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, is essentially the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption, and we Americans inhabit a nation of numbingly false promises. Urged to believe that we stand for something nobler than frenetic marketing, "we the people" now endure anxiously in a very lonely crowd.

In America, prosperity has supplanted individual dignity. The economy is "improving." Yet, with a population of 300 million, the core edifice of American wellbeing is still based upon an addictive consumption. Still struggling to find self-worth in cellular telephones or related toys, we have long forgotten the vital difference between genuineness and gloss.

An authentically "individual" American is now little more than a historical artifact. Our mass society has no capacity or intention of producing either mutual human understandings or the rudiments of national security. To the contrary, this soulless herd strives actively for atomization, alienation and individual loneliness. It is possible for us to be lonely in the world or lonely for the world, and — unhappily — the American celebration of mass society has now produced both.

Every sham may have a patina. Consider that we now live shamelessly at the lowest common denominator. Most of our universities (Princeton is a clear exception) are training schools, promising jobs, but not an education. Here, as elsewhere, everything is product, and product's only reasonable purpose is to expand the bottom-line.

Today, faced with external threats from Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan, we are carried forth together by great collective agitation and by the immense momentum of various hideous entertainments. We may wish to slow down and smell the roses, but America now imposes upon its entire exhausted people the breathless rhythm of a machine. The end of all this delirium is to prevent us from remembering who we are and what we might still become.

What does it mean to be an American? We pay lip service to the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution, but almost no one really cares about these musty old documents. For the most part, we Americans now lack any sources of cohesion except for periodic celebrity sex scandals, local team loyalties and the always comforting brotherhoods of war.

Operation Iraqi Freedom is now being fought largely by those who desperately need the wages. Middle-class and affluent kids still go off to law school or (even sillier) to acquire an MBA but almost never to Baghdad. However one might feel about the war's lawfulness or strategic correctness, it has now become a plainly undemocratic enterprise. Like Vietnam in my own time, this war's corrosive burdens fall much more heavily upon the poor and working classes of America.

Sadly, we Americans inhabit the one society that could have been special. Once we had a unique potential to nurture individuals to become more than a crowd. Emerson, after all, had described us as a people motivated by industry and self-reliance, not by anxiety, fear and trembling.

Shortly, the swaying of the American ship will become so violent that even the hardiest lamps will be overturned. Then, even through the opaque depths of history, we will be able to make out the phantoms of great ships of state. Once laden with silver and gold, they are now entirely forgotten. Only then will we learn that the circumstances that could send the works of Homer, Goethe, Milton and Shakespeare to join the works of utterly forgotten poets are no longer unimaginable. They are in the newspapers.

In spite of our claims to be "rugged individuals," we Americans are now shaped by the crowd. Our battered society bristles with annoying jingles, demeaning hucksterism, humiliating allusions and endless equivocations. Surely, we think, there must be something more to this country. "I celebrate myself, and sing myself," said the poet Walt Whitman, but today the American self is under daily assault by stupefying music, ritualized tastelessness, epidemic gluttony and seriously bad food.

In an 1897 essay titled "On Being Human," Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879, asked plaintively about the authenticity of America. "Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine?" He answered "yes," but only if we first refuse to stoop to prevailing corruption, venality and double-talk. Otherwise, Wilson understood, our entire society will be left bloodless, a skeleton, and dead with that rusty death of machinery, more grotesque even than the death of an individual person.

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Credulity is always one of our worst enemies, and our growing American inclination to believe that sacredness lies in the mass is an existentially fatal disorder. No doubt, war and terror endanger us today, but so too does our willful abandonment of the individual. Recalling Wilson, nowhere is there greater potential for educational leadership and understanding than at Princeton. Louis Rene Beres GS '71 was a politics major and Ph.D. student, and now lectures and publishes on international relations and law. He may be reached at beres@polsci.purdue.edu.