One of the problems that we face in today's geo-political framework that is new is the attenuated boundaries on the map that used to be rather solid and definite. We now live in a world where communications and transportation force once separate and distinct cultures, ideologies, and people to rub up against each other. If markets go down in Japan, they go down in the US. The exchange of goods works within a massive web of cause and effect where lives are effected thousands of miles apart in small towns from various industries that are networked.
Because of the confluence of economic and political flows outside and in spite of once solid boundaries, new orientations to the world are needed by all governments. This means that the myth that America is somehow exceptional in this massive mix must be changed or abandoned. David Kyuman Kim argues for the latter:
I am looking for a way to open a space for a disposition and an outlook that I believe can help mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism. Let me be clear: I do not think that the myth of American exceptionalism has gone away quietly in the twilight of the Bush administration. In my estimation, the disenchantment of giving up the myth of American exceptionalism will involve experiencing the lived effects of the catastrophic, of coming to terms with cultural nihilism, and even with worldly collapse. It will involve relinquishing the comforts—metaphysical and otherwise—of being an imperial power.
As with any social change, those who experience anxiety towards it will react in often negative and incendiary ways. This is not unlike the reaction formation a two year old shows in the face of change. In order not to experience the pain of loss, the two year old will pre-emptively negate everything. The persistent negation by the Republican party as well as the Tea Partiers who are gathering this weekend show a similar reaction. Before they submit to mourning the death of exceptionalism, they will deny that it is true and react with hostility, anger, and nihilism. By now it is clear that this kind of reaction is evident in the language and demeanor of those involved with the reactionary stance. Yet, the resistance itself is evidence that change is happening somewhere. If it is not in terms of "business as usual" in the United States, change is happening somewhere that has a direct effect on what happens on US soil.
Let me put it more forcefully: I am trying to engage and join a project that recuperates these values of democracy, freedom, and hope. Nonetheless, I think that such recuperation can only take place through a reckoning with American complicity with evil in the world and with the acknowledgment that it will be difficult to be different from what we have been––as a nation, as a people––for the last two-plus centuries. Again, I worry that America is a nation that is too prone to arrogance, to over-confidence, to the indulgence of self-interest. And I also worry that once we realize as a people—the social imaginary of “the American people”—that we are in fact living through a catastrophic age, the relinquishing of the myth of American exceptionalism will leave us prone to reactionary forces rather than to moral and ethical ones.
Kim calls for an elegiac tone and posture for working through this change. However, what will happen with the reactionary buildup? Does is by natural selection dissipate? That is to say, is the prospect of adapting to change so inevitable at this point, that the hostility from the reaction will die off like a dying branch on a tree? Who are the actors responsible for initiating this change of tone and message to move to a more radical kind of change that embraces the death of exceptionalism? It would see to be the responsibility of every citizen. However, this is a tall order given the amount of attention the reactions from the Right on Fox News and the counter-reactions from the Left on MSNBC give us. Reason and this elegiac demeanor are hidden under all the rubbish. Who will liberate this view and is it within the President's power to do so?
I am also wondering how the world wide community of Christians fits in with this set of problems. Is the church helping or hindering the healthy mourning of exceptionalism in order to adapt to a changed world? Kim's closing lines seem to address the position that the church as an organizations like international corporate trade that is, or ought to be, grounded apart from the limitations of political, social, cultural, and economic boundaries.
To adopt an elegiac temperament is to embrace an ethic of aspiration, as well as the commitment to self-cultivation and attunement. It is, finally, also to acknowledge that one has to die a little in order to live fully, freely. This is an elegiac move because it requires acknowledging that with change there is loss, especially a loss of love. It requires sacrifice. And it requires courage, conviction, and the willingness to leave one world behind in order to lay claim to another world, and, further, to leave a love behind by claiming a new love. Disenthralling ourselves from American imperial ideology may mean that we will make a world with heavy hearts, but hearts that have turned, converted, shifted to a world worth dying for and living for.
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