In His Speech on the Muslim World, Obama's Still Dogged By the Problem of Origins
No, not his own origins -- the origins of what his administration evasively calls 'our values.' Relative to the pedigree of our shared convictions, the pedigree of the president is almost trivial. At an opportune moment, Barack Obama prudently revealed his birth certificate to the world. In his speech today on the future of what his administration evasively calls 'the region', Obama faced another such moment of truth. But he steadfastly refused to show the birth certificate of our ideals.
Why? The trouble is not, as some allege, that Barack Obama does not believe in our ideals. He has spoken eloquently and at length about his belief in America's animating values and where they are destined to lead. But make no mistake, to borrow a phrase: the president's view is rigorously ecumenical, like Whitman's or Emerson's; his vision of American exceptionalism and universalism (yes -- the two are intertwined), home grown as it is, stands firmly opposed to the singularity of the claims about America and its place in the world that stem from the Biblical tradition.
Looking to the origins of our two great competing American claims about American exceptionalism and universalism reveals that only one worldview -- the Biblical one -- is frank and confident about the origins of its convictions; the other, the ecumenical one, is queasily evasive about them -- going so far, as our culture makes plain day in and day out, to abandon entirely the very language of conviction, seeking refuge and self-assurance in the cleverly calibrated category of 'commitment'.
It is, I admit, almost unfair to demand that a presidential policy address, especially one such as this so clearly written by committee, speak to ideas of foundational importance (even if the incapacity of the world of policy to comprehend the world of ideas is the point that must be made). So, in fairness to the president, this queasiness, this uneasiness about the source of our American convictions is a characteristic illness of our long modern age. At the close of the nineteenth century Nietzsche wrote of "the repressive influence which democratic prejudice in the modern world exercises over all questions of origin." From the democratic standpoint, it is a scandal that our claims to universalism and exceptionalism should have their origins in particular claims -- particular religious claims, no less, about the nature of man and God.
So instead of the Biblical tale (or even the one told by Plato and Socrates), we hear from the president a narrative that reaches back no further than the Boston Tea Partiers and Rosa Parks. These are important figures, to be sure, but it is evident that they were invoked by the president in the same spirit and for the same purpose as he invoked the various synonyms and proxies for 'our values' -- "universal rights," "liberty," "dignity" -- that strung together the policy line items of the speech. Rather than a story that leads inexorably back to a defining point of origin, Obama gives us a mythos that pulls the very moments at which our origins are revealed outside of their 'narrow' context, placing them into a new, ecumenical context in which we need not (indeed, cannot) inquire as to whether dignity, liberty, and universal rights exist conceptually in an inescapable tension, or whether the meaning of each concept itself is contested. These are 'our values', liberated from the definitional dictates imposed by the where and the why of how they came to be:
Our people fought a painful Civil War that extended freedom and dignity to those who were enslaved. And I would not be standing here today unless past generations turned to the moral force of nonviolence as a way to perfect our union –- organizing, marching, protesting peacefully together to make real those words that declared our nation: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
Not merely for the sake of poetic convenience, even at the expense of good grammar, does the quote stop there. The truths, plural, contained in the Declaration's statement of origins cannot be edited away from the equality clause without doing violence to who we were and are. (Nor, by the same token, is the Declaration itself a self-sufficient account of our origins!) But here, for the record, is the president's position on violence:
Prosperity [...] requires tearing down walls that stand in the way of progress[.]
Of course, Obama explains that the 'walls' he speaks of are barriers raised by corruption and bureaucracy (things he seems able to see only from afar). Let us not take him out of context. But let us take the time to ponder why the president lumps "the patronage that distributes wealth based on tribe or sect" in with the graft and the bribes and the red tape. Is it not evident that societies ordered around tribe and sect are precisely those for whom the source of identity in origins is least in question and most important? Is it not all too clear that precisely this difference in 'values' has placed the Arab and Muslim worlds in a defensive, adversarial posture relative to the US and the west, no matter what policymakers say or do?
It is for this reason that presidential frankness on the not at all ecumenical origin of our values is to be much desired but not much expected. To admit them is to place ourselves uncomfortably on an uncanny path -- one which leads away from reassuring predictions of the inevitability of progress and the inexorability of the ecumenical democratic creed. The failings and achievements of the president's address, taken as a document of policy, are incidental to those we will suffer or celebrate when, at last, if ever, we place at our head a leader capable of confronting openly the problem posed to the world and its liberal ecumenicists by the stubborn link between who we are and how we came to be.
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Re: In His Speech on the Muslim World, Obama's Still Dogged By the Problem of Origins
Bonus: On The Bottom Line, I pick apart the speech with Reason's Tim Cavanaugh:
Oct '10
Re: In His Speech on the Muslim World, Obama's Still Dogged By the Problem of Origins
I like the use of Nietzsche here to explain why in a democratic age, a country would prefer to forget that its values spring from religion. I think this is an important extension of Nietzsche's cultural analysis to modern times.
I do detect a whiff of the academy at a few points. Consider this sentence:
Rather than a story that leads inexorably back to a defining point of origin, Obama gives us a mythos that pulls the very moments at which our origins are revealed outside of their 'narrow' context, placing them into a new, ecumenical context in which we need not (indeed, cannot) inquire as to whether dignity, liberty, and universal rights exist conceptually in an inescapable tension, or whether the meaning of each concept itself is contested.
Are you sure conservatives should be loading up their sentences with words like "contested", "context," and "mythos"? The road to squish is paved with highfalutin.
Re: In His Speech on the Muslim World, Obama's Still Dogged By the Problem of Origins
And here I thought you were gonna go after "indeed."
Oct '10
Re: In His Speech on the Muslim World, Obama's Still Dogged By the Problem of Origins
James Poulos
And here I thought you were gonna go after "indeed." · May 20 at 11:52am
It might have (indeed, must have) crossed my mind.