The problem with America lies in our choice of heroes

Larry Kummer, Editor

16 years ago

Summary: We choose our heroes unconsciously, choices which shape our daytime actions. Our modern heroes serve us poorly, pointing to our weaknesses and away from our historic strengths. This is the fourth in a series about our struggle to adjust to the new century; links to the other chapters appear at the end.

“The myth is the public dream, and the dream is the private myth.”
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)

What do Superman, Spiderman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer — and their countless peers — have in common that makes them terrible heroes for America? Fun dreams, but symptomatic of a growing weakness in us that imperils not just our Constitutional regime but the foundations of the nation?

It’s not their superpowers. Consider other examples of this symptom: Batman, Sheriff Will Kane (in High Noon), the Lone Ranger, Dashell Hammett’s Sam Spade and the Continental Op. It’s their role as individuals, and so contrary to the collective action that actually built America.

Super-empowered individuals (using Tom Friedman’s neologism) have always played a large role in American myth, from from James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier hero Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo to the libertarian hero John Galt (in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged). Until now this fantasy existed in creative tension with our true greatest strength — people working together to build America. The Mayflower Compact, the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, abolitionist societies, wagon trains, cattle drives — groups from Franklin’s Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire (our first property insurance company) to the Boy Scouts of America. Our triumphs during the Great Depression (avoiding totalitarianism) and WWII.

Teamwork and powerful institutions used to populate not just our history books but also our legends. Such as Marvel Comic’s SHIELD, E. E. Smith’s Triplanetary, Robert Heinlein’s Space Patrol, and UNCLE (as in The Man from). No longer. Today organizations most often appear in today’s fiction as irrelevant, inept, or evil. During the 1960’s and especially the 1970’s we became alienated from our institutions. Organizations which should have led us into the future, like NASA, failed us. We learned that institutions which should have protected us, like the FBI and CIA, were often criminal oppressors. Institutions which we admired, like the military, displayed gross incompetence.

Our response is not reform, whatever the cost or effort. Instead we retreat into fantasy. Ignoring the great problems facing our nation, we attempt to triumph by ignoring them. As the punch line to the Russian joke goes, we’ll pull down the blinds and pretend we’re moving. Gridlock in Washington becomes progress. The Blue Fairy will solve everything — if we believe in fairies.

“A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group.”
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)

Conclusion

One person can make a difference. That confidence has (and hopefully will remain) a core American tradition. To work it must remain in balance with its opposite, our ability together to build powerful institutions. Otherwise we’ll be shep, controlled by special interests beyond the average individual or household’s to influence in any way.

The ability to maintain balances between contradictory values is distinguishing strength of western civililzation. Freedom-equality. Science-humanities. Nature-Art. Human rights-Multiculturalism. Periods where we lose these balances often end badly.

Where does this lead us?

Mark Lilla explains how this will play out in “The Tea Party Jacobins“, New York Review of Books, 27 May 2010 (see another excerpt here):

Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that “the people” can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

… {w}e need to see it as a manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century. … it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

… We are experiencing just one more aftershock from the libertarian eruption that we all, whatever our partisan leanings, have willed into being. For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing — though it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations.

Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so they could get rich fast, and they have — and it’s left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children. We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.

Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still — free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”

Note the echos of libertarian theory at the end of The Matrix, an entertaining example of fetal politics.

“I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. … A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.”

An assessment of the real Tea Party movement, beyond the hype

“Gauging the scope of the tea party movement in America“, Washington Post, 24 October 2010

Other posts in this series