Bring on the cultural reformation

Reader Conor sends a link to a must-read Commonweal essay from Andrew Bacevich, the retired colonel and professor of international relations. He's a conservative, but has long been a critic of the Iraq War. In this long, wide-ranging essay, Bacevich warns that the United States is in danger of losing the Republic because of cultural decadence combined with a crusading pridefulness that refuses to acknowledge the limits of our own power to remake the world to suit us. This is the fault of both left and right, in Bacevich's view (which is the same view I put forth in "Crunchy Cons"). Here's a key passage:

During the same postwar period, but especially since the 1960s, the nation’s abiding cultural preoccupation focused on reassessing what freedom actually means. The political project was long the exclusive preserve of the Left (although belatedly endorsed by the Right). From the outset, the cultural project has been a collaborative one to which both Left and Right contributed, albeit in different ways. The very real success of the political project lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s insistence that the United States today offers a proper model for other nations-notably those in the Islamic world-to follow. The largely catastrophic results of the cultural project belie that claim. [Emphasis mine -- RD.]

The postwar political project sought to end discrimination. The postwar cultural project focused on dismantling constraints, especially on matters touching however remotely on sexuality and self-gratification. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Edmund Burke once observed, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites.” In the aftermath of World War II, Americans rejected that counsel and set out to throw off their manacles. Freedom came increasingly to imply unfettered self-indulgence.

The Left contributed to this effort by promoting a radical new ethic of human sexuality. Removing chains in this regard meant normalizing behavior once viewed as immoral, unnatural, or inconsistent with the common good. On the cutting edge of American culture, removing impediments to the satisfaction of sexual desire emerged as an imperative.

Laws, traditions, and social arrangements impeding the fulfillment of this imperative became obsolete. As a direct consequence, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and children raised in single-parent homes-all once viewed as problematic-lost much of their stigma. Pornography-including child pornography-reached epidemic proportions. Pop culture became a titillating arena for promoting sexual license and celebrating sexual perversity. And popular music became, in the words of cultural critic Martha Bayles, a “masturbatory fantasy.”

Some Americans lament this revolution. Many others view it as inevitable or necessary or positively swell. Regardless, the foreign-policy implications of the sexual revolution loom large. The ideals that President Bush eagerly hopes to propagate throughout the Islamic world-those contained in Jefferson’s Declaration and in the Bill of Rights-today come packaged with the vulgar exhibitionism of Madonna and the debased sensibility of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Note, however, that the metamorphosis of freedom has had a second aspect, one that has proceeded in harmony with-and even reinforced-the sexual revolution. Here the effect has been to foster a radical new conception of freedom’s economic dimension. Increasingly, during the decades of the postwar boom, citizens came to see personal liberty as linked inextricably to the accumulation of “stuff.”

Here, the enthusiasm for throwing off moral chains came from the Right. The forces of corporate capitalism relentlessly promoted the notion that liberty correlates with choice and that the key to human fulfillment (not to mention sexual allure and sexual opportunity) is to be found in conspicuous consumption-acquiring a bigger house, a fancier car, the latest fashions, the niftiest gadgets.

By the end of the twentieth century, many Americans had concluded, in the words of the historian Gary Cross, that “to consume was to be free.” The events of 9/11 did not dislodge that perception. In early 2006-with the nation locked in what President Bush insisted was an epic confrontation with “Islamofascism”-an article in the New York Times Magazine posed the question “Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy?” In the conduct their daily affairs, countless Americans, most of them oblivious to Bush’s war, answer that question in the affirmative.

Along the way, consumption eclipsed voting or military service as the nearest thing to an acknowledged civic obligation. If citizenship today endows “the sovereign shopper with the right to select from store shelves,” Cross comments, it also imposes “the duty to spend for the ‘good of the economy.’” Americans once assessed the nation’s economic health by tallying up the output of the nation’s steel mills or the tons of bullion locked away in Fort Knox. Today, consumer demand has emerged as the favored metric of overall economic wellbeing. In recent years “Black Friday” has taken its place among notable dates on the national calendar-the willingness of consumers to open their pocketbooks on the day after Thanksgiving having become a key indicator of economic vigor. Woe betide the nation, should holiday shoppers spend less this year than last.

American globalism did little to foster this radical change in American culture. But the cultural revolution-both the sexual liberation demanded by the Left and the conspicuous consumption promoted by the Right-massively complicates our relations with those beyond our borders, who see our reigning conceptions of freedom as shallow and corrosive.

Bacevich goes on to say that the central question posed by the failure in Iraq is:

Are ongoing efforts to “change the way that they live” securing or further distorting the American way of life? To put it another way, will the further expansion of American dominion abroad enhance the freedom we profess to value? Or have we now reached a point where expansion merely postpones and even exacerbates an inevitable reckoning with the cultural and economic contradictions to which our pursuit of freedom has given rise?

If we're going to continue to defend "the American way of life," it's going to require massive infusion of money -- which we're borrowing from abroad -- and a commitment to militarizing our society for the sake of reforming the world. Far better for us to focus on reforming ourselves, and our own habits, both cultural and economic. We are, Bacevich says, writing checks on a bank account that's already overdrawn, and living as if the law of gravity (so to speak) had been repealed by force of American will. And we are slowly moving towards tyranny, which will be required if we are to keep up our self-indulgence. Bacevich again:

Our own self-induced confusion about freedom, reflected in our debased culture and our disordered economy, increases our susceptibility to this totalitarian temptation even as it deadens our awareness of the danger it poses. Escaping its clutches will require something more than presidents intoning clichés about America’s historic mission while launching crusades against oil-rich tyrants on the other side of the globe. We are in difficult straits and neither arms (already fully committed) nor treasure (just about used up) will get us out. Our corrupt age requires reformation.

A final thought: from time to time here, I mention lessons I learned at a Dubai media conference last year at this time. I am haunted -- the word isn't too strong -- by what I saw among the Arab Muslims, as they grappled with the new media world that was going to wipe out, or at least dramatically alter, their traditional culture. As an American scholar of the Arab world told me at the time, we Americans have to understand that the media revolution our culture underwent took place over 50 or 60 years, and within a culture that was much more able to receive it. The Arabs are getting it jammed up within about 10 years, and they're far less culturally flexible. Some things are going to break. And despite the problems I have with Islam, and my desire to see some pretty basic aspects of Islamic culture (e.g., the way they treat women) change, I can't be enthusiastic about American cultural hegemony. The idea that the Middle East would become an outpost of Hollywood depresses me. Better Hollywood than Peshawar, to be sure, but still, those of us here who lament how corrosive the nihilistic American popular culture is should consider how it must look to Muslim men and women overseas, who quite rightly see us as a threat to the things they hold dearest.