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What Motivates Progressive Self-loathing?
So much of the liberal progressive mentality seems ultimately to be grounded in self-loathing. There’s the environmental condemnation of Western civilization (or even humanity itself) because it’s destroying the planet; there’s the multicultural impulse that admires all other cultures but despises our own; there’s the Hollywood instinct to make Americans (especially those in the corporate or military worlds) the villain in every story. Self-loathing is a common thread.
What I don’t understand is where this comes from, psychologically speaking. A normal, healthy psyche does not seek out reasons to hate oneself or one’s own culture. Is it guilt over our affluence and success? Is it an adolescent attitude of rebellion? Elitism?
Is it, as I’ve heard suggested, the product of decades of subversive Soviet influence designed to undermine American culture? (Apparently there is some evidence that this was not just Red Scare paranoia but a deliberate strategy.)
I just don’t get it. Ronald Reagan reminded us that confidence and optimism are inherently more attractive than self-flagellation. Why do so many people today willingly, enthusiastically, embrace a philosophy that is fundamentally based on the assumption that their own culture is something to be ashamed of?
And more importantly, how do we fix it? How do we convince these people that it’s OK to feel good about themselves and our country?
Published in General
“An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.” – G.K. Chesterton
I tended to find progressivism persuasive when I was young, because I figured if an American thinks America is fundamentally flawed, it must be true. The idea that America is evil was very unpleasant to me. I assumed that the natural tendency would be jingoism, and that very few Americans would accept the idea that America is evil, unless the evidence forced them to accept it. I wasn’t sure what that evidence was, but I figured if all these educated people are progressive, they must be onto something. Needless to say, I was wrong.
I think that progressivism allows one to be righteous very cheaply. To be a conservative hero, you need to risk your life fighting the Taliban, or sacrifice your time by raising large numbers of good children (biological or adopted), or something else of similar difficulty. To be a progressive hero, you mainly just need to take the right positions and strike the right poses and announce them regularly.
People fantasize about being superheroes, but they don’t fantasize about being Jimmy Olson. After the 9/11 attacks, I learned that real heroes are not that ironic. The Rambo American soldier guy with the gun who is the hero in movies, is actually the hero in real life too. I realized I had to accept that I was Jimmy Olson and not Superman, or even Rambo, and be okay with it. There are some people who aren’t okay with that.
I agree with that, and humility is certainly in order. I think the OP was referring to the “self loathing” Liberals have for their culture. I put “self loathing” in quotes because it’s not actual self loathing. It’s a stance against one’s own culture.
Well, I don’t think conservatives are saying they are not complicit. We are one body and we all add to the culture, that’s one of the reasons I’m not Libertarian. ;) To bemoan the state of our culture is not necessarily to say we are not complicit, though I grant you some may. But I think you miss the point. Conservatives are bemoaning an element of the culture. If I idolized the middle ages, for example, that doesn’t mean I approve of every element of the middle ages. Liberals are repudiating western culture at an existential level. That’s “self loathing.”
Apropos of nothing: Superman is a hero because, for the most part, he refrains from using his power to influence humanity’s progress.
This is also why progressives tend to despise Superman.
Yes, I’ve seen it and agree.
Ah. Well I am literal-minded, and when I see self-loathing, I think of loathing oneself. Loathing one’s culture primarily involves loathing Other People.
A thousand times Yes. They are not self-loathing. They are Manichean and other-loathing. They have a worldview that the good people of each race / religion / culture / gender / nation must unite against the bad primitive hateful people of each race / religion / culture / gender / nation. For some on the right, it’s always Munich 1938. For many on the left, it’s always Selma 1965. Good people (in their view) are those who stand up to the evil people of the dominant race / religion / culture / gender / nation, especially if it’s their own.
Did you ever develop a condescending attitude about Germans’ ignorance about American culture and politics? My experience has been that, notwithstanding their extreme confidence in their knowledge of American “culture” and institutions, many Europeans are clueless to certain aspects of our culture and are completely clueless to how our government works and, more specifically, as it relates to federalism.
Which, I’ll also point out, is exactly what good, conservative parents giving their children a proper, well-disciplined upbringing tell their children all the time.
We conservatives are the party of “you brought this on yourself” ;-)
One thing I’ve noticed whenever I see a progressive’s choice of inspirational quotes is a long list of variations on, “Great people stood out from the crowd,” and/or, “Think for yourself.” At some point a certain type of person concludes that if great people were different, then the first step toward becoming great is to go out of one’s way to be different. And so they turn against mainstream culture thinking that that alone establishes their status as intellectuals. The idea that thoughtful people might honestly believe that society is right is self-evidently absurd to them.
And, of course, the fact that the rest of society fails to recognize their brilliance only makes them hate society even more.
I saw it written (I think it was Jonah Goldberg, but don’t quote me on that) that for a lot of anti-American socialists, their anti-Americanism actually came first. They only embraced socialism because capitalism was seen as too American.
About the phrase “self-loathing,” I did, for the most part, mean it loosely (as in, hating America when one is an American). But there are cases where I wonder.
For example, consider the activist celebrities who decry wasteful consumption and one-percenters, while at the same time flying all over the world in their private jets and living in their enormous mansions. Many of them, I’m sure, are just cynical liars who are going through the motions of progressivism because it makes them look good. But I’m sure some of them really believe it.
Privately they must look at their own lifestyles and think “My God, I myself am a horrible manifestation of everything I hate about America.” They might feel unable to do anything about it, but surely they must see it. That is self-loathing.
Collective guilt. It’s the rap they place on us when it comes to racism, sexism, “gun violence”, and it’s a hair shirt they gleefully don because it makes them feel like they have to change the world.
“I screwed up this planet. My family screwed up their planet. My culture screwed up this planet. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
It allows them to always see the world as not-quite-right, and it gives them some motivation to change things, even when no change is needed.
This was brought home to me in college, when I was dating liberal chicks, and one of them said to me, “Don’t you feel guilty for all the bad things that we’ve done to this planet?”
I looked at her and said, “No. Why should I feel bad for something I haven’t done? I take responsibility for my actions, not someone else’s.”
We broke up that same evening.
For starters they don’t identify as a part of Western Civilization or any one nation. We truly are in a post-national era. When I was in graduate school one of my classmates from Portugal claimed to not identify with any flag, meaning that, while he was from Portugal, he didn’t identify as Portugese. He did not identify with any nationality. Now keep in mind during Obama’s 2008 Germany speech he claimed to a citizen of the world. There is no identification with Western Civilization and thus there is no need to feel good about. This opens it up to all sorts of the ridicule that you will hear from any Leftist you might come across.
Second, most of the cultural elites who occupy the Left believe themselves to be the corrective force of Western Civilization. They think themselves the vanguard of what folks like Voltaire or Rousseau are claimed to have begotten society. They think they are liberating us rubes from the backward thinking of jingoism. They pity those of us who look at the breadth of Western Civilization and see more good than harm because they view us as nonthinking, noncritical people. That we reject “the other” for no other reason than it is “the other.” Never mind the fact that Western Civilization is the impetus behind the many things they hold dear, most notably “high culture.” Those are your two major reasons.
This isn’t quite right. What Conservatives loathe about Western Civilization is the actual malignant parts of it; communism, authoritarianism, radical anti-Christianity. It’s a very stripped down list for sure but if you were to trace the Jacobites who were loathed by Burke in his day to the radical Obamaites of our day, you will find that they hate the same things.
Only when it’s true.
The progressives, by contrast, make this claim against the descendants of those who committed the “crimes” they seek to punish (without trial). Collective guilt, rather than individual justice. That’s the difference.
MFR, I don’t think we are saying that we aren’t complicit. I think what we are saying is that the wonderful parts of Western Civilization–complex symphony music, the pre-modern art, an elegant style of dress, as well as all the intellectual ideas that propelled humanity forward and out of the swamp–are what we identify as the real culture. Everything else are malignant tumors of Western Civilization, i.e. communism, bohemmianism, and spiritless materialism. We know that we are fallen, but it is the high culture of society that inspires us to reach a higher plain while those who buy into the malignant aspects are the ones you generally see exhibiting the absolutely worst parts of human nature.
George Bernard Shaw, an obvious socialist and believer in the malignant things of Western Civilization.
Agreed. But then they are saying “your ancestors brought this upon you”, not “you (quite literally) brought this upon yourself”.
This is why it is such successful manipulation. Both the good guys and the bad guys use it, and we use it on ourselves. But it can be used to justify almost any evil.
People need to be very careful with these mind games.
Even on a personal level, people need to be careful. See Man’s Search for Meaning. It is at the heart of the most destructive and debilitating abuse in personal relationships too. Which is why the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote the book thirty years after he had put Auschwitz behind him. To help his patients in their daily life. He practiced in Boston, for heaven’s sake.
OK, but that should make the self-disgust any one of us feels for individually not living up to “real culture” standards all the more acute. After all, it’s all on us: we can’t pawn off our cultural and moral shortcomings on others and remain good conservatives.
It is for this reason, incidentally, that I think many conservatives need a religion of redemption. The moral weight we expect ourselves to bear individually as conservatives can quickly become intolerable if we’re not damn near perfect and if we’re willing to see ourselves as we really are rather than denying our shortcomings.
Overwhelming guilt (even if it’s totally deserved) actually paralyzes moral agency. Collective guilt can always be shrugged off as “secretly, I know this isn’t really my fault”. Individual guilt can’t, which puts many conservatives at a disadvantage without a redeemer.
I think that intelligent people are vulnerable to falling into progressivism, because progressivism is very flattering to those of exceptional intelligence. Progressivism assumes that there will be central planners, and presumably those central planners will be picked from the best and brightest. Conservatism, in contrast, says that no one is intelligent enough to be an effective central planner. If someone has two degrees from Harvard, it’s not hard to see why they would resist the conservative vision more than, say, a plumber. A plumber probably has a much better grasp of his abilities and limitations than an academic.
But lefties are collectivists. They believe in groups rather than individuals. I’m not sure they recognize the moral distinction you’re making.
They do. Or at least they make enough distinction for it to matter. After all, they still see themselves as individuals, and aren’t dumb enough to avoid the obvious conclusion:
If collective guilt exists, then each individual’s share in it is rather small, since it’s spread out among so many people.
This is a huge statement and one that is right on the money. This is the entire crux of why Western Civilization is the preeminent civilization on the planet and why the Left hates it so. Only in the West could there have been a philosophy of Man being faulty and thus needing redemption. This redemption is predicated on a sincerely professed acknowledgement of sin and the asking for forgiveness. It is the realization that man cannot be perfected and thus must be as individually free as possible to realize and repent for our own individual failings. There is Christ, Locke, and Jefferson all rolled up for you right there.
The Left, and why they hate Western Civilization so much, does not view themselves as faulty and believes they can perfect man, but this inevitably leads to coercion and mass extermination. There is Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, all of the malignancies of Western Civilization personified.
I completely disagree. The entire crux of Progressiveism is a play on emotion and a complete negation of rationalism. If a person is homeless, it is the fault of people with means who no not this person’s name as opposed to the immediate circumstances of the homeless person, whatever those may be. Progressives rely on a raw, animalistic reaction to life, a type of fight or flight mentality. It is the absolute opposite of intellect.
EDIT: I guess you said the same thing there. I should have read past the opening sentence. I apologize about that.
So true.
In my head, I see Democrats as those who like groups but dislike individuals and Republicans as disliking groups but liking individuals. :)
You’ll enjoy this: “Oikophobia: Why the liberal elite finds America revolting” by the great James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal.
In my post the phobia(s) that may destroy America, I said:
I am continually amazed by the level of fear, contempt, and anger that many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people demonstrate toward Christians and rural people (especially southerners.) This complex of negative emotions often greatly exceeds anything that these same people feel toward radical Islamists or dangerous rogue-state governments. I’m not a Christian myself, or really a religious person at all, but I’d think that one would be a lot more worried about people who want to cut your head off, blow you up, or at a bare minimum shut down your freedom of speech than about people who want to talk to you about Jesus (or Nascar!)
…and speculated about some reasons for these attitudes.