A CULTURE OF LOSERS
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism,
and Identity. His editorials appear regularly in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
and Pajamas
Media. He
speaks about his latest book, Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books), at frontpage.com.
In an important book, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of
the American Character, which appeared in 1992, Charles
Sykes speaks of “victim chic” and deplores its “catalog
of immanent grievance and infinite self-assertion.” Sykes
quotes former Assistant Education Secretary Chester Finn, who
had it exactly right: “In our no-fault society, it is
acceptable to be a victim but not to be held responsible for
one’s own situation or for that of one’s children.”
We have, Sykes argues, torn up the moral contract underwriting
“shared middle-class values” and installed a “victimist”
ideology in its place, eliminating social distinctions “based
on individual success.” We all experience unfairness and
injustice, he concludes, “but that does not mean we need
to turn them into all-purpose alibis.”
The
confirmation of Sykes’ thesis is all around us. It seems
as if we now live in societies filled mainly with victims: victims
of mainstream culture, victims of exclusionary daycare policies,
victims of transfats, victims of the schoolyard game of tag
where some poor child is made to feel “it,” victims
of secondhand smoke, victims of the tax system, victims of anti-terror
laws, victims of those who pose as victims, victims of state
lotteries, victims of potentially lethal glass mugs in British
pubs, victims of our genes, victims of “puritanism”
(i.e., moral propriety), victims of this and victims of that
— those who make up what Bruce Thornton in Plagues of
the Mind has aptly called “the conga line of victimhood,”
to which the nanny state materially contributes.
And
this new class of victims is abundantly complemented by an army
of “survivors,” cashing in on what they regard as
the prestige of those who have experienced real, historical
calamities. Once we were content to say, as in the title of
a famous poetry collection by D.H. Lawrence, “Look! We
have come through,” and leave it at that. Now we are driven
to proclaim our newfound status. We are survivors of this phobia
or that phobia, survivors of one or another disease, survivors
of tenement life, survivors of reality TV shows, survivors of
the free market and corporate industry viewed as a great and
oppressive structure of domination, survivors of brutal parents,
survivors of feral children, survivors of workplace humiliation,
survivors of scalding cups of McDonald’s coffee, survivors
of what-have-you, all clamoring for attention, recognition,
sympathy, and compensation.
But
survivors are only victims by another name, for their “survival”
depends on the acknowledgment of their suffering, that is, on
what we might call an Asclepian concern from those who have
not yet joined this therapeutic category. The flaunting of debility
is their greatest strength. They own their victimhood and will
not be deprived of it. Radio host Larry Elder, author of The
Ten Things You Can’t Say In America, has coined the
term “victicrats” to apply to African-Americans
who profit from the bogey of white guilt, but it could apply
equally well to the entire commonality of professional victims
who make their living off the cult of entitlement that has sunk
its roots deep into the Western psyche. In a culture that has
scrapped natural endowments in favor of artificial entitlements,
nothing succeeds like failure.
Which
compels one to ask, isn’t anybody normal anymore?
It seems as if we now live in societies where almost everybody
has a right or a claim and practically nobody has a duty or
an obligation. “The great escape of our times,”
writes Thomas Sowell in Real Clear Politics, “is
the escape from personal responsibility for the consequences
of one’s own behavior.” It looks increasingly as
if we are on the way to becoming our very own third world in
which we demand and expect to be heard, to be taken care of,
and to receive ample redress for the wrongs we have all suffered,
the abuses we have endured, and simply cannot conceive of a
world in which we are not coddled and subsidized. Living in
a lose-win culture, we revel in our voguish condition as a society
of the disabled.
It
gets worse. Everyone is innocent, it seems, except those who
are prepared to assume responsibility not only for themselves
but for their cultural patrimony as well. Despite the
superficial differences, it is really the same quivering mindset,
the same passion for submission, that governs our behavior in
both the domestic and international realms. In the former we
regard ourselves as victims of social circumstances before which
we protest our helplessness, demanding that the state pay welfare
retribution to those who come bandaged with grievances. In the
latter, we suffer for the sins of our precursors and implore
forgiveness for their evident transgressions, pleading to be
shriven by our enemies. For both we and our enemies are regarded
as victims of the same tainted past.
It
is a subtle discrimination which disguises a real similarity.
In the civil dimension, we demand special treatment; in the
political domain, we beg forgiveness. These look at first like
opposing states of mind. But political atonement for the past
“crimes” of our fathers is only the other face of
civil reparation for the former “indifference” of
the state. In either case, we surrender our independence of
will, affirm our innocence before the tribunal of our own self-righteousness,
and aspire to a kind of beatification of our motives and purposes.
In effect, we are giving up; at the same time, we assert
the sanctity of our being and continue to perpetrate an immaculate
deception. Whether for the experiences we have undergone in
our own lives or for the conduct of our predecessors, we
are not responsible.
Nor,
in the latter case, are we willing to grant that a civilizing
imperative was also at work. President Obama’s orgy of
apologies to the world for American political behavior is a
salient illustration of this decubital pathology. We must demonstrate
our “good faith” and, of course, do everything in
our power not to give offense, in this way making amends for
what we take to be an exclusively inconsiderate and violent
history. As if nothing good ever flowed from the West. As if
no other culture or civilization were guilty of colonial depredations.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art changing the name of its “Islamic
Galleries” to the unwieldy “Arab Lands, Turkey,
Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia,” as well as
its removing three ancient images of Muhammad from its permanent
display, is another revealing example of this tendency toward
prostration.
Thus,
social, political, and economic systems predicated on the autonomy
of the person, a robust sense of self, pioneering vigor, exploration
in every domain of human endeavor, the principle of a just meritocracy,
and even the right to name or represent things accurately are
considered ethically suspicious and ideologically opprobrious.
Free and contentious democracies, home to a self-reliant and
muscular individualism, are anathema to a vast phalanx of oddly
aggressive pietists consecrated to an agenda of self-immolation.
The only enemies they recognize are those of their fellow citizens
who struggle to maintain the core Western values of liberty
of thought, speech, and action and who wish to preserve the
spirit of accountability for oneself — in other words,
those who refuse to claim special dispensation for their personal
present or offer apologies for their historical past.
In
a fascinating article commenting on the chemical cocktails consumed
by the late pop icon Michael Jackson, columnist Sarah Honig
writes that the “substances he used to soothe whatever
unsettled him weren’t substantially different from the
kitschy catchphrases which serve as the proverbial painkillers
in our geopolitical reality.” She is referring chiefly
to Israel, but her diagnosis is no less true of sociopolitical
reality throughout the West. The bromides we ingest to dull
our minds, she continues, “are just as common among respectable
unthinking denizens in the world’s democracies as prescribed
narcotics are in Hollywood. They are just as addictive, no less
imbecilic, and every bit as dangerous.”
Honig
is on the money, as are Sykes and Thornton and Elder. We have
lulled ourselves to sleep with the fashionable tranquillizers
of the day, the “facile formulations” of current
social and political nonthinking which we use to absolve ourselves
of personal responsibility, cultural dignity, and historical
conviction. To extend Honig’s Michael Jackson analogy,
we are moonwalking backward as an unforgiving future advances
with determined tread.
Reader
feedback HERE.
