American Culture in Peril

The Critic and Culture

THE CRITIC AND CULTURE Jean Bethke Elshtain Everybody’s a critic. It seems to be a natural right among Americans to gripe about pretty much everything, but government above all. How many times have you heard the plaint “They are all a bunch of crooks,” that politics is an innately dirty game. Trust in politicians and the political process is at a nadir among us. In addition, for many decades, cultural elites anointed themselves the designated critics of the culture. Much of their criticism consisted of treating with contempt popular or low culture, by contrast to the high culture of which they claimed they were the keepers. Today, elite criticism finds in the outpourings of ordinary citizens about the state of our union nothing but ignorant fanaticism. And so it goes. We hear a good bit of shouting, but it is difficult to penetrate, hard to get our bearings. As a result, in order to counter elite critique, some suggest that criticizing the country in severe terms is tantamount to a lack of patriotism. The predictable response is that the only worthy patriot is the critic. CULTURAL CRITICISM AND THE LOVE OF COUNTRY It is not my intent to make my way through all this noise. Instead, I want to start at “another place,” as we say. When we think about the Hebrew prophets of old, we are reminded that they were part of, and loved, the people, the Israelites, they were criticizing. They did not see themselves as above it all or on the outside. Reminding myself of this, I recalled a very wise comment made several years ago in a speech by Cardinal Francis George of the great city of Chicago. He stated, “You cannot criticize effectively what you do not love.” He had in mind criticism of the church that, from all too many quarters, comes from a stance of bitter animus. 98 Jean Bethke Elshtain One can find similar animus at work in too many criticisms of contemporary America. It is the flip side of the old notion of American exceptionalism. You have some idea of what that entailed—the claim that America was an exceptional nation that was anointed in a historic sense to carry on a particular mission in the world, one that lifted up at all times and carried forward the message of freedom. The position of American exceptionalism gets a very bad press nowadays, but there were several versions of it. One lent itself to aggressive nationalism; another, to robust patriotism—America was indeed exceptional in a number of ways; that was simply a fact—but that did not demand that we treat the loves others had for their particular countries lightly. Instead, we recognized that love and worked with it, so to speak. Surely Abraham Lincoln’s idea, put forward in the agony of his country at the time, that America is “the last best hope on earth,” is an expression of the gentler form of American exceptionalism. Still, there are among us critics who make no distinction whatsoever between the belligerent and the more pacific versions of American exceptionalism , critics who condemn it without restraint. But they do so in a manner that is itself a species of a noxious form of American exceptionalism, namely, representing America as the leading exemplar of injustice, racism, imperialism, classism, capitalism run amok, venal globalism—you name it, if it is bad, we embody it. Put forward as criticism, this quickly becomes a type of conspiracy theory: if anything bad is happening somewhere, America’s bloody hands are bound to be involved. In response to this sort of virulent outburst, the defender of America may well go overboard in another direction and exonerate us altogether of historic sins, crimes, and misdemeanors, offering up a too rosy view about us and everything we have done. Thus we find a great deal of back-and-forth that is labeled criticism but takes us nowhere; it is by now so much background static that does not assist the ordinary citizen in thinking about how we might go about loving our country and criticizing it at the same time. Those who do not love their country as American citizens will be entirely unmoved by the argument I will set forth. So be it.You can’t win ’em all, as they say. The Critic and Culture 99 NIEBUHR’S CULTURAL CATEGORIES Let me step...