on upside

m writes:

“I’ve been struck for a long time by the same attitude toward criminals in America that you mention in your post, as lurking around every corner and infected with ‘evil’, etc.

To me, it’s very obvious what role this attitude towards evil plays here, what the ‘upside’ is. There’s at least two. First, it serves to solidify social bonds. For instance, for people watching an American television show tracking down ‘child predators’ and bringing them to justice, these people, scattered all over the place and fragmented, can now for a brief moment feel that they are part of the community of the good. So the upside here is that this attitude towards criminals serves as a kind of glue, a way of strengthening the social bonds of the ‘good’ by symbolically tightening them and excluding the ‘evil’.

Second, the Puritan attitude towards criminals, especially when used by the police or government officials, serves as a way for them to justify (to themselves and their communities) their own roles and actions, which can often be quite coercive. Which is not necessarily to say that this is a pure form of manipulation or propaganda.”

This all seems true, though I meant something a bit different and probably wasn’t clear enough. All of the above sounds more like “social payoff” then like true upside.

What I really meant is something like this… Normally, when any analysis is done among intellectuals about the differences between the United States and Europe, the unspoken background to such analyses is: “yup, America is just as stupid and vulgar as I thought.” This tendency is merely intensified by American intellectuals in the humanities, who tend to be the biggest America-bashers around. We tend to be Europhiles in this line of work. This isn’t entirely bad… Raymond Chandler, the literarily fine detective novelist, wrote about how any good American writer will need to be someone of fundamentally European tastes, and I take his point. However, this can also degenerate into Europhilia as embarrassing as leaving home in Wisconsin and going to write your next book in Sils-Maria, or at a higher level, T.S. Eliot from St. Louis adopting as many English affectations as he could carry.

Tocqueville is refreshingly free from such judgments, and does a nice sympathetic job of seeing the upside and downside of the emerging American culture.

To sum up, the knee-jerk intellectual response would be: “Ha! Americans are too hung up on sex, criminals, and good vs. evil.” But it shouldn’t be forgotten that America is a great civilization, whatever its numerous downsides. Numerous important literary, scientific, political, and industrial figures have emerged from the United States. Try to look back on this country with the eyes of a historian 1,000 years from now– the United States landed people on the moon, the least talked about amazing achievement of the past half-century. Atomic energy, which may destroy us but could also proliferate our species to other stars, was also nurtured in the United States.

So, I think it’s important not just to take the European side automatically on every Europe/America cultural difference. And that’s what I meant by “what’s the upside of investing the criminal with evil power?” We shouldn’t assume that the American attitude toward crime is only Puritanical hysteria. Or if that’s all it is, then we should also look for places in the culture where Puritanism has genuine intellectual benefits that Europe can only dream of. What I am asking for is a balanced assessment, and I do think we get that from de Tocqueville on most issues.

Notice also that the American Left falls into the same sort of trap precisely by always criticizing the United States as evil, which is just the inverse of Dick Cheney viewing it as good. The CIA must be responsible for unspeakable evils everywhere, etc. As a European friend of mine once sarcastically described the attitude of two hysterical America-bashing Americans she knew: “America must at least be the worst if it’s not the best.”