But this America was also an ethno-religious land of white Christians. It had a great deal of prejudice and identity. Jews still stood out. And it was the land of free markets and capitalism combined with an austere morality. In the business field some Jews excelled and fit in quite nicely (particularly German Jews), but others (often their sons and the Russian Stetl Jews) resented and rebelled against. The tension of this new community and the natives many Jews fear their lot would be the same as it was in Europe. And they reached for the same solutions: radicalism, control of the instruments of culture, accumulation of welath, domination of the professions, etc.

So for this group the real heroes of America are its universalists who preached a vision of America in which the Jews would not stand out: Abraham Lincoln prioritizing the natural moral law above the rigors of positive law. And FDR who led a grand crusade to save Europe and externalize our concern for good government at home to securing democracy for the whole world. And the Jewish left also praise its radicals; the John Browns, Wobblies, and all the rest. And why? Because these folks move us from being a European style “Fatherland” to a more abstract nation in which all can join in equally, especially the Jews.

This America–the rationalist ideological version that later combined with a highly self-critical version of the dark ethnocentric past–is the America they live in. It started later, only with the arrival of the European proletariat, and it has little connection to our Founding, our previously dominant WASP elites, or any recognizable form of the Christian beliefs that suffused American life until the 1950s. It is the promotion of a seemingly neutral account of the past that has little bearing on the actual contours of that past. It’s a blind rewriting of the past for petty ethnic reasons that harm the confidence and patrimony of the former elite. This is pretty much Slezkine’s thesis too in The Jewish Century, but he looks not just at the rise of a superficially meritocratic rationalist ideological state in the US but also Russia.

I strongly suspect that I am the only Eunomia reader-responder (other than perhaps Mencius Moldbug if he still reads here) to have ever actually written parallel processing code in Linda, the development of which is AFAICT Gelernter’s main claim to fame in CompSci (the Linda language never made it out of the university; only CS grad students and DoD researchers like me ever used it to my knowledge).

Back in the day when I cared about such things, I was fairly unimpressed with Gelernter as a computer scientist, but I certainly considered him as deserving of recognition as a Real Computer Scientist as anyone else, and more than many who got more funding. A borderline case for the “quite important” qualification, I guess.

Dr. Gelernter is unquestionably a victim of the Unabomber (though he’s also an example of someone trying to derive additional moral authority from his victimhood), and AFAIK he is indeed Conservative observant, but why do you think his standing in CompSci, whatever that standing might be, makes his garbage any more infelicitous than it would be if e.g. he’d been a noname professor of accounting who got maimed by Kaczynski?

“America is not only for the whites , but it is for all. Who is the America? The American is you, me and that. When we go to America we will become Americans and there is no a race or nationalism called America and the Americans are those Africans, Indians, Chinese, and Europeans and whoever goes to America will become American…American is for all of us and the whole world had made and created America. All the people all over the world had made America and it shall accordingly be for all of us. I will never feel ashamed when I claim for my right in America and it will not be strange when I raise my voice in America.” - Col. Moammar Gadhafi

I would, however, question the idea that patriotism is all that contingent on our attitude towards the rest of the world. He said:

“But if you cannot imagine saying, even in matters of no ultimate moral import, “I don’t care if the rest of the world does it, the rest of the world is wrong, the rest of the world can go to hell,” then you are no patriot.”

There may be occasions when it is necessary to say something like that (though there is really no reason why love of one’s country should entail telling other nations to go to hell, unless they are attacking your country), but I think it is a mistake to premise patriotism on responses to attitudes in the rest of the world, whether they are negative or positive. The first part of the statement, “I don’t care,” is where it could stop and the point would be made. The rest of the world could only be “wrong” if the issue was one of moral import. In matters of custom and fashion, the rest of the world usually cannot be “wrong.”

Likewise, whether or not other peoples around the world like us or dislike us should be irrelevant to our attachment to our country, and how they do things in Europe or elswhere is interesting but obviously not binding on us (nor are our ways binding on them). Similarly, our way of life is our own and we have our own reasons for valuing it and preserving it, and it does not matter whether the rest of the world follows suit or not. In a sense, we should be almost indifferent to the customs of other peoples. Live and let live. The “internationalism” Esolen criticises is a busybody, intrusive sort, and the Americanism Gelernter describes is the same. Esolen wants to be left in peace to mind his own business–well and good. Gelernter wants to meddle in the affairs of every other people on earth, just as the left “internationalists” would have for all of us. The differences between Esolen and Gelernter seem vast, so how can he say the article is “superb”?

A respectful distance from other nations better suits patriotism, but not a distance so vast that it precludes learning and exchange. Once patriots become embittered against the world, they tend to turn aggressive and begin defining their loyalties not by what they love and by what they are but instead by what they reject and what they are not. Gelernter’s Americanism seems filled with aggression and defines American-ness in militant opposition to much of the rest of the world. The business about America-as-religion is just crazy icing on the cake. I don’t see how Mr. Esolen could share Gelernter’s views and write the post that he did.

The entire debate is confused by these terms internationalist and/or globalist and Americanist. Internationalists and globalists are not actually more interested in other nations and other ways of life–they see global, international institutions as a vehicle for power, and they favour all those things that tend towards the homogenisation of all nations to one dreary, servile standard. Globalists are not even really internationalists properly speaking, since internationalism presupposes the continued existence of nations–globalists would like the world to be without nations, or as close to this state as possible. Americanists of Gelernter’s stripe at least are not necessarily interested in the existing America, but see it as something to be exploited to advance their global agenda.

That is what is so bizarre about this Americanism–it is global in its claims and ambitions (”a global religion”), and it uses our history simply as a springboard to propel itself into the world. It is no less “internationalist,” or rather globalist, except that it prefers that power remain vested in national institutions. The debate here between Gelernter and the “internationalists” is over the difference between global hegemony run from Washington and globalism in which other powers also play a significant role. Both are certainly deplorable, but the former is much more dangerous because it is can still make a powerful nationalist appeal (through its use of rhetoric about exceptionalism and national mission, etc.) and can exploit natural patriotic resentments against transnational elites (whose detachment from and hostility to natural loyalties offends patriots). Every time a patriot falls for Americanist/hegemonist rhetoric, a different more virulent kind of globalism has been empowered.

Add to all this that Gelernter’s article takes as its basic assumption that desiring withdrawal from Iraq has something to do with pacifism, and it is anything but “superb.”

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2007/09/i-love-thy-rock.html

I’m told G’s quite an important computer scientist, a victim of the Unabomber, and an observant Jew. These facts only serve to make his venture into American creedalism more infelicitious.

The various religious groups described don’t agree on what books make up the Bible, let alone what it means. Read Ben Sirach lately, Rev. Robertson? How G. manages to derive “equality” and “democracy” from any plausible reading of the Bible is so far beyond me that I won’t try to refute the notion.

As for the Bible and “Americanism,” even Americans who purport to revere the Bible have very little idea of what’s in it.