Our cyber-pal Kevin Kim has gathered up a nosegay of posts spanning the gamut of opinions about the Ground Zero mosque. I haven’t written much about it myself — obviously I don’t want to see it built — but I will say that the proposal has done more to get people speaking frankly about Islam than anything I can remember, including 9/11 itself.
Another thing this controversy has done has done has been to bring into sharp distinction two views of America that have been the subject of much debate for some time in conservative circles, but not so much elsewhere. Ross Douthat (how do you pronounce that name?) summed it up very well in a recent Op-Ed piece:
There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.
But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora — and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms, and quickly.
The term generally used to described the first view of America described above is that we are a “proposition nation”: it’s the view that all that is essential about America is a revolutionary set of abstract principles. This view — that America owes its greatness to an ennobling philosophical vision conceived by an extraordinary assemblage of men, a vision that has succeeded beyond the wildest imaginings of its Founders precisely because of its universality — is very appealing, and it is a majority view on the Left. But there it has taken on another aspect as well, namely that America’s greatness and prosperity are due only to those abstract principles, without regard to the culture in which they are instantiated. To put that another way, the assumption is that so universal are these abstractions, so generally do they address the yearnings of every h. sapiens, that they will bring forth the same fruit without regard to the particular soil in which they are planted. Furthermore, the extended assumption goes, such is the transformative power of these abstract principles that any human minds, once conditioned by them, will thenceforth function as entirely interchangeable parts in the machinery of society. Ties of ethnicity, religion, language — all the things that have been, throughout history, what has bound societies together, and rent them apart — simply will no longer matter, save as something resembling hobbies. E pluribus unum, we are reminded (although that motto refers only to the joining of the States into a new Republic); such is the greatness of the Constitution that it carries forward, into a sunlit future, all that really matters about human nature, leaving behind only those primitive urges and emotions we can do better without. There is no shortage of metaphors to reach for here: one can see the Constitution as a great sieve, lifting our better nature from the murk, or as a decanter that pours, from history’s bitter lees, the clarified wine of human reason and virtue. It’s a splendid vision of human progress, and it’s easy to see why so many people believe it with such righteous ardor, and defend it so jealously. I used to do so myself.
I have come to realize, though, as my shadow lengthens eastward, that as uplifting as all this is to contemplate, it is also terribly naive. Yes, America’s founding principles are the very root of its greatness — in that sense the first view of America is quite correct. But the second view is correct as well: the soil from which the flower springs, and the climate in which it is nurtured, are every bit as essential to its vitality as the seed the Framers planted.
Both views of America are essential to understanding its uniqueness, its exceptional place in history, and its prospects for the future. But to assert the importance of the second view contradicts the fashionable, “extended” version of the first — the idea that America’s greatness is due only to its founding abstractions, and in no important way to its historically predominant culture and ethnicity. So offensive is this contradiction to educated society nowadays that to insist upon it is to be marked as a bigot, a xenophobe, a racist, a Know-Nothing, a Yahoo (and a morally reprehensible one at that, as I find out from time to time in my email).
This marks an essential distinction between current-day liberals and conservatives. Conservatives, for the most part, readily acknowledge the power and importance of America’s philosophical foundation. But they also realize that culture matters, and that no nation, even one inoculated against faction and injustice by the Constitution, can thrive if it is not the homeland of a united culture and people. Liberals, however, insist — with the force of taboo — that such claims are not only wrong, but despicable. The propositions are sufficient, they tell us.
Well, we will see how this goes. Facts are stubborn things.
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