Free Preview: The Illusion of Innocence by Shelby Steele
Many have argued that the political liberalism coming out of the 1960s quickly became—despite all its good intentions—a threat to freedom in America. I think this is true, but not the entire truth. Since the 1960s there has been a force at work—let’s call it a great urgency in the American social order—that has given us a liberalism that short shrifts to freedom. This liberalism is more an effect than a cause. And its threat to freedom is essentially a by-product of its desire to achieve the “good”—“to end poverty in our time,” to integrate the schools, to bring diversity to our institutions, to overcome all manner of social and economic inequities, and now even to universalize health care. So many beguiling ideas of the “good.” Thus, the real threat to freedom is not as much the instrument of post-sixties liberalism as this almost visceral urgency in society to be identified with the “good.” Out of this urgency comes the perverse “moral courage” to disregard the disciplines of freedom.
What is this urgency that threatens freedom?
The answer begins in the fact that civilized societies have an inherent moral accountability. The sins of one generation not only stigmatize subsequent generations but also make these ensuing generations responsible for reforming their forbears’ misdeeds—misdeeds they themselves never committed. Think of Germany. Will there ever be a day when the Holocaust against the Jews will be forgotten, when German children can be born into innocence? Can we ever hear the German language spoken without hearing—as unfair as it may be today—a Nazi echo?
Stigma is the mechanism that carries moral accountability from one generation to another. Thus, white Americans—even newly arrived white immigrants—live under suspicion of being racists though they may harbor no racist sentiments whatsoever. Actual guilt or innocence is not the point. Moral stigmas operate by association, and by casting a society’s sins as aspects of its God-given character. So the postwar stigmatization of Germany asserts that Germans have a characterological attraction to fascistic evil against which the world will always have to be on guard. White Americans are stigmatized as characterologically racist. When evil is a feature of the collective character, moral accountability for that evil is permanent—whether or not the evil is active or latent in society. Moral stigmas are most often unfair to individuals within a stigmatized group—for example, the white who is not a racist—but they can also be civilizing forces for the group as a whole.
And it is simply the case that when a society or group acknowledges a sin, it becomes stigmatized with that sin. There is an irony here because in doing the honorable thing one becomes stigmatized. But viewed another way, the acknowledgment reflects a determination to civilize society, and the stigma simply—and rather ruthlessly—enforces that determination. Only defeat in war forced Germany to acknowledge its horrendous sin. Then came the stigmatization—the idea of characterological German evil. The civil rights movement so disrupted American society in the 1950s and 1960s that white entitlement, as a legitimate way of life in America, was finally defeated. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was, effectively, a white American acknowledgment of the nation’s long and immoral indulgence in white supremacy. For this honorable, if belated, acknowledgment, white America was immediately stigmatized as racist—and thus made morally accountable.
When societies and groups openly acknowledge their misdeeds, they implicitly agree to stigmatization as penitence.
But what leads a society or group to finally acknowledge its inhumanity to its fellow man? It is certainly not a guilty conscience, since the society will have long ago developed the rationalizations to live comfortably with its evil. White supremacy, for example, was an ideology that let whites oppress others innocently. Its very purpose was to put the white oppression of colored inferiors beyond the reach of moral judgment. We are not subjugating blacks, whites could say; we are merely enforcing God’s natural hierarchy of races. The idea of God-given superiority (Hitler’s Aryan supremacy is another example) allows the superior to repress the inferior out of a kind of noblesse oblige—as if the repression was a service to God and God’s enterprise of shaping the world in his image.
Societies acknowledge their misdeeds only when their illusion of superiority is finally shattered so their oppression of others is seen not as a noble obligation but as a banal and self-serving hypocrisy. Without the ideology of white supremacy, segregation becomes visible as a staggering hypocrisy. It denies individual freedom to blacks in a society founded on the creed of individual freedom. So it is not the specter of past and present evils that finally drives societies to concede their inhumanity to others. This kind of acknowledgment happens only when these evils become broadly visible as hypocrisies. Societies can live easily with their evils but not with their open hypocrisies. Segregation was an evil for one hundred years. But the great achievement of the civil rights movement was to finally establish it as an open hypocrisy.
Why? Because to confirm segregation as a white American hypocrisy was to confirm it as a lie. If, for example, black inferiority was actually God’s will, segregation would be a silly redundancy—so much effort and so many cruel repressions (including terrorism and murder) to keep down a people already consigned to inferiority by God. The hypocrisy—the lie—was that segregation was innocent because it only reflected God’s natural hierarchy of races. But then why the oppression? Hypocrisy is pretending to be what you are not. And with segregation many (not all) white Americans pretended to be innocent even as they colluded with oppression—thus, the lie. But when segregation was established as a lie in the 1960s, all focus shifted from the argument over segregation to a demand for accountability from white America. Suddenly the hypocrite—not his victim—was on the hot seat, and segregation’s inherent evil was simply a given in the case against him.
The point is that when a hypocrisy becomes established in a society, it becomes an extremely powerful transformative force—socially, culturally, and politically. Those associated with a hypocrisy that has become conventional wisdom are changed forever. And this was the fate of white America after the sixties. Few groups in history have taken their proven hypocrisy more to heart than white Americans. Yet there was really very little choice. If a society rejects responsibility for a hypocrisy it has already acknowledged, then it undermines or destroys its legitimacy as a society. This is why established hypocrisies are so transformative. They hold the legitimacy of the society and all its institutions in the balance: work to overcome this hypocrisy or risk illegitimacy. With segregation white America had been caught out in a lie, and this threatened the legitimacy of the American government itself. How could the authority of this government be legitimate once the scope of American hypocrisy around race was acknowledged? And in the sixties there were riots from one end of America to the other that asserted precisely the illegitimacy of American authority.
So the great urgency in the American social order mentioned above—the urgency that gave us post-sixties liberalism and the will to disregard freedom—is the loss of moral authority and legitimacy that came into American life after American hypocrisy was confirmed in the sixties. To acknowledge one’s hypocrisy is to lose one’s innocence—not a genuine innocence but a presumed innocence. America had always enjoyed a kind of naïve faith in its own innocence, its sense of itself as a fundamentally good nation of good and open people. This innocence was always a theme of the American identity, something that set Americans apart as they strolled foreign streets. It is a blessing of confidence for a country to think of itself in this way. It is a kind of exceptionalism. And this “blessing of confidence” is exactly the innocence that America began to lose to its hypocrisies in the 1960s.
And there were many hypocrisies that came to light in the sixties. When it was clear that blacks would succeed in establishing segregation as an American hypocrisy, the floodgates opened. Women came next. They had demanded equality for as long as blacks. Abigail Adams, in letters to her husband John, had urged him to make sure that equality for women was expressly written into the Constitution. But this was not an American possibility at the time, and women languished without the vote for another century and more. And there was the relegation of women to the domestic realm that technological advances and expanding prosperity began to make redundant in the 1950s. By the mid- and late 1960s the fate of American women was shaping up to be yet another instance of great American hypocrisy.
Then there were the Mexican farm workers, the Eskimos, the native Hawaiians and—most poignantly—the Native Americans who had fought whites for three centuries before finding themselves relegated to reservations. And it wasn’t just a case of everyone with a beef piling on. It was a deepening and expanding of the idea of American hypocrisy. Here was case after case in which America had pretended to be what it was not—a free and open and fair society.
And looming over all of this was Vietnam—a war conducted by the world’s greatest power against a small Asian country five thousand miles away. Here was the immense American “military-industrial complex” at war in a small country of yellow people, engineering coups behind the scenes and picking puppet dictators on the one hand, and claiming to be the world’s beacon of freedom on the other. Whatever one may feel about this war—and however history may ultimately judge it—in the sixties it fit perfectly the emerging template of American hypocrisy.
So Vietnam expanded the specter of American hypocrisy far beyond the predictable complaints of the famously alienated—blacks, women, and other minorities. It caused an entire generation of white middle-class American youth to become enveloped in the belief—the faith, really—that hypocrisy was the central truth of American life. And our failure in Vietnam, our slogging along year after year in the purgatory of war, only further established this war as a grand exhibition of American hypocrisy—a trope, a metaphor for the American soul. Vietnam represented a final compounding of American hypocrisies into nothing less than a vision of American characterological evil.
Here was the idea that America was not an inherently good country but an inherently evil one. And of course the evidence was everywhere: racism and sexism at home, imperialism abroad. Even the environment was suddenly being seen as a victim of American hypocrisy. This is when America irrevocably lost its innocence. This is when whites were collectively stigmatized as racists and white men as sexists and warmongers. The entire American way of life became stigmatized as shallow, bigoted, conformist, and greedy—given to military adventurism abroad and empty consumerism at home. In the imagery of this period America was kitschy and materialistic one minute and supremacist and murderous the next. In any event, our presumed innocence as a nation—our faith in our fundamental fairness and decency—was soundly defeated. In its place came the idea of our characterological evil.
This was the confluence of charges that soon led to something new in American life—a “counterculture” that essentially defined itself in opposition to American hypocrisy. Vietnam had enabled middle-class white youth to feel themselves the victims of American hypocrisy—of a government that “lies”—much as blacks and other minorities had always felt. But of course the counterculture went much further than its antiwar position. Armed with the idea of characterological American evil, it invented itself along several themes: war is always wrong; material wealth is always decadent; sexual mores are inauthentic; feeling is more truthful than reason; poverty has both innocence and integrity; blackness carries wisdom, whiteness is trite; nature is truth, the city perverse; truth is always relative; and so on. A compendium of mostly bad ideas, but ideas unified by their assertion of “authenticity” in the face of America’s notorious hypocrisy.
I mention the counterculture because it illustrates the same great mistake that American politics made in the 1960s. When America began to lose the illusion of its innocence in the sixties—as hypocrisy was established as the nation’s characterological evil—our culture and our politics were confronted with a choice. We could have shored up our wobbly legitimacy as a democracy by returning to the principles and disciplines of freedom, the long betrayal of which is what led to the crisis of the sixties in the first place. We could have determined to at last become a democracy of individuals, and set to work building fairness into every corner of American life. In other words, we could have absorbed one of the great lessons of the 1960s: that we are in fact not an innocent society, unless one considers slavery, segregation, the confiscation of Indian lands, and second-class citizenship for women to be aberrations from an otherwise perfect innocence. We are a society of rough-and-ready human beings that has been humanized not by an innate innocence but by the force of law and the rigors of the Constitution (despite our many betrayals of both).
So our first choice is simply to accept that we cannot count on our innate innocence as a way to a better society. The genius of our Constitution is its understanding that discipline, not innocence, is what makes for a better social order. If segregation was a moral failure it was more importantly a failure of democratic discipline—an indulgence in bigotry over democratic principle and the law. In this first choice our great labor would be fairness, a recommitment to freedom’s disciplines.
The other choice we had coming out of the 1960s—the choice that American liberalism actually followed—was to try to recover this self-same illusion of American innocence that the sixties had just exploded. Smarting from “the fall”—the implication of characterological evil—brought on by so much documented hypocrisy, this choice went with denial rather than acceptance. We would redeem our democracy and win back our legitimacy through a kind of self-insistence. We might or might not lift up those we had oppressed, but we would make a great display of social activism—a display of contrition on the one hand and of a determination to right past wrongs on the other—that would advertise our fundamental innocence no matter the results we achieved. This choice, in other words, was to invest in our innocence as the force that would both redeem and transform modern America. The sixties was a chance at self-acceptance, and thus a chance for a realistic vision of the future. But this was not to be.
American liberalism in the 1960s shifted its focus from freedom—its great historical mission—to redemption, to showing an America innocent of its past evils and hypocrisies. It put its faith in innocence rather than in the law. Yet the civil rights movement had been a movement of classic freedom-focused liberalism. Martin Luther King had fought for freedom, individual rights, and equality under the law. But post-sixties liberalism had little patience for freedom. To simply work toward fairness in society was too passive a mission. Worse, with freedom there could be no guarantee of results, and this liberalism wanted results above all else so that it could actually demonstrate that American society and its institutions were becoming innocent of America’s past. A classically liberal focus on freedom and fairness was simply inadequate to the true goal of this new liberalism—to seize political power in the name of redeeming America of its past.
Add to this the fact that any politics claiming freedom as its great cause had become stigmatized in the sixties with all of America’s past sins. After all, hadn’t Americans been rapturous about freedom even as they had abided slavery and segregation? So how could freedom suddenly restore America’s moral authority and legitimacy? Wasn’t talk of freedom and fairness really only code for a return to hypocrisy?
Moreover, modern American conservatism has been nothing if not a freedom-focused politics, and so it has endured the same stigmatization as freedom itself. In post-1960s America it is simply a sophistication to believe that mere freedom is not enough to redeem America of its past. In fact, conservatives, precisely because they celebrate freedom, are presumed to do so because they really want to preserve the hierarchies and inequalities of old. Liberalism’s great post-sixties cultural victory has been to infuse American culture with the idea that freedom—and its contemporary politics of conservatism—are morally inadequate to the demands of the times. Call a man a conservative, and you have called him a bigot and a hypocrite. Call him a liberal, and even the failed policies he supports flatter him because they display his good intentions, his innocence of the vile American past.
So the 1960s gave us a liberalism that uses innocence as a formula for power—innocence of the American past as entitlement to power. (Conversely, modern conservatism is presumed not to be innocent of that past, and therefore not entitled to power.) This is an activist liberalism that wants to intervene and socially engineer big, dramatic “good works” that are virtual exhibitions of innocence. It is different from the New Deal liberalism of the 1930s in that it never asks anything of the people it seeks to help. This is how it proves its innocence—by giving but never asking. It isn’t truly after actual accomplishment in the real world as much as the self-aggrandizement of feeling innocent—that sweet little narcissism of seeing oneself above the shames of the past.
The first “good work” of this liberalism was the Great Society that President Johnson claimed would “end poverty in our time.” Then came welfare grants aimed primarily at blacks (as victims) that asked absolutely nothing of them except that they not be married. Often an abstract vision of innocence would be announced, like “school integration,” and there would follow a draconian program of school busing to engineer this vision into reality. Today “diversity” is a vision of innocence that American institutions from corporations to the military slavishly pursue through heavy-handed regimens of double standards and preferential treatment. The “Green” movement and the “climate change” movement—whatever the actual reality of the problems they address—are framed as assertions of new American innocence against old America’s hypocrisies. And once this innocence-versus-hypocrisy framework is in place there is the inevitable reach for power, the call for government action. In this liberalism, the government is the champion of innocence against America’s characterological evil—public power as the force for innocence against the hypocrisies of private power.
The pretense of modern liberalism is that it always stands ready to snatch America from the gravitational pull of its own characterological evil, its hypocrisy. This is its great sanctimony. So it is always doing us a favor when it names “a good” and then abridges freedom to chase that “good.” Yet school busing all but destroyed the neighborhood school in America. Diversity means that today all black high school seniors—by dint of their skin color alone—are prohibited from freely competing with their white and Asian peers for admission to college. All agree that health care today needs reform, yet liberalism’s focus on “the good”—synonymous with the “public option”—over freedom is likely to give us “universal” mediocrity rather than higher-quality care.
Modern liberalism thrives by using America’s past hypocrisies as leverage against the timeless principles of freedom today. It is a liberalism of “moral” leverage and muscle, not a discipline of principle. It bullies freedom with the idea of an impossible innocence. Yet it takes its fire from one idea above all others: that it is the answer to America’s characterological evil. But neither evil nor innocence is the whole American truth. The civil rights movement did not succeed because America finally became innocent; it succeeded because America finally became principled.
In the 1960s America was shamed into an obsession with innocence. Yet, ironically, this innocence has much in common with white supremacy. Both are concepts of supremacy. Both seek power at the expense of freedom—the power to build a “good” and new world in their name. But the idea of American innocence is as bogus as the idea of white supremacy. Both are vanities that try to supersede freedom. America was humbled by its indulgence in white supremacy, and it will be again by its lust for innocence.
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