Citizens, Not Subjects

Our patriotic desire to unite in solidarity can become undisciplined and distorted, manifesting itself in overheated and corrupted patriotic emotions that weld people together into an uncritical mass. It is a phenomenon all too easily encouraged and manipulated by demagogues. To avoid this danger, contemporary elite opinion tends to adopt a postpatriotic mentality, one that is pained by vigorous expressions of patriotism and imagines itself superior because they are “tolerant,” “sensitive to differences,” and “inclusive.”

There is a danger in this approach as well, however, one I experienced when I visited the 9/11 Memorial. An acute sense of national identity may be vulnerable to abuse, but it creates a communal solidarity that binds together the powerful with the weak, the rich with the poor, the leaders with the led. Patriotism encourages a shared sense of common purpose, one that brings the president to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the buck private while both are saluting the flag. The same holds for shared moral and religious convictions. We are all governed by the same moral law, and God is not, as the older translations of the Acts of the Apostles put it, “a respecter of persons.”

Mid-century totalitarianism perverted patriotism, seeking to annihilate the individual by absorbing him into a supposedly higher and more sacred collective destiny: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Thousand-Year Reich, and so forth. I fear that our present-day elites now tend to operate in the opposite way, not by constructing grand schemes to absorb us, but instead by deconstructing them and isolating us as individuals. The postmodern critical mentality weakens the religious, moral, and national convictions that draw us together. It seeks to repress patriotism rather than exaggerate it, and in the place of the old rhetoric of solidarity offers only therapeutic terms.

We see this tendency in the dominant way with which our leaders now talk about 9/11. They focus on “tragedy,” “loss,” and “healing.” The 9/11 Memorial itself is almost entirely organized around this therapeutic approach, which tries to create a “sensitive” atmosphere for us to “explore” our own meanings.

As Martin Filler observes with some dismay in his enthusiastic review of the 9/11 Memorial in the New York Review of Books, a family member of one of the victims described the memorial as cold, complaining that “there should have been flowers or pictures or something.” It’s a natural impulse. Faced with death and alone in our grief, we want to express our emotions and honor the dead with something living—a simple, shared tradition of memorial flowers, perhaps, or religious rituals, or a reminder of a larger, national narrative in which their deaths play a part.

Filler’s response on behalf of designer Michael Arad is telling: “But of course it is precisely the abstract nature of Arad’s design, which eschews all representational imagery, that allows visitors to project onto it thoughts and interpretations of a much more individual nature than if the memorial had been laden with pre-packaged symbols of grief.” The same dismissive response would obtain, I assume, for my own desire for flags. Shared rituals, common narrative, and national symbols corrupt and diminish our freedom to make our own meanings, or so we are often told.

This seems, at first glance, a gesture of humility. “We cannot pretend to tell you, dear visitor, what 9/11 means for you,” this way of thinking seems to say, “We can only facilitate your personal journey.” But what seems is not so, for the therapeutic approach can easily reflect the ambitions of what Pope Benedict famously called the “dictatorship of relativism,” a regime of opinion that dissolves the strong convictions that allow us to hold the powerful accountable, which is an essential dimension of a free society.

We ignore our patriotic emotions at our peril. As Maya Lin recognized when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, perhaps only intuitively and perhaps in contrast to her conscious beliefs, but nonetheless successfully, our patriotism needs to be purified, not denied. The basic achievement of modern democratic culture has been the transformation of passive subjects into active citizens. Repressing national symbols, the dictatorship of relativism threatens to turn us into a mere collection of individuals, saluting nothing together, serving nothing together, sacrificing for nothing together.

Atomized and isolated, we risk becoming passive subjects again. As the national symbols that arouse patriotic emotions are repressed (“We don’t want to encourage jingoism!”)—and forthright moral language is set aside (“We mustn’t be judgmental!”), the purposes of leadership change. You and I must be managed therapeutically by experts—administrators of our soft, postmodern dictatorship of relativism—rather than engaged as fellow citizens.

This, it seems to me, is our postmodern political temptation. Under the dictatorship of relativism we risk retaining the outward forms of a democratic culture while losing a vital sense of public meaning that can engage us in a common cause—and hold us accountable to it. Instead of citizens, we are damaged psyches of “tragedy” that need “healing” and isolated individuals who are encouraged to tell our own “personal stories.”

I am not entirely pessimistic. When I visited the 9/11 Memorial I noticed that somebody had left one of those “prepackaged symbols” that Martin Filler so dislikes. It was a small pennant-sized American flag wedged into the top of one of the letters in James Patrick Leahy’s name. Like the patriotic sentiment it expressed, the thin wooden shaft fit perfectly. And then, on my way to the subway after I left the Memorial, I passed Charlotte’s Place, a community center that was hosting an arts project commemorating 9/11. On the walls were dozens of inventive renditions of the American flag, some loving, some critical, as it should be.

That small, solitary flag and the unofficial exhibition struck me as more honest—and more humane—than the half billion dollar 9/11 Memorial with its cascading water and brass railings. Yes, of course many of us have personal 9/11 stories. But we also share a national story.