After America

There’s a lot of it about in the age of self-esteem. No satirist could invent a better parody of solipsistic sloth dignified as idealism than a bunch of people sitting around waiting for themselves. Hey, man, you’re already there. What are you waiting for?

Many electors voted for Barack Obama in order to check “vote for a black president” off America’s to-do list. Framed like that, it sounds worthy and admirable. But one could also formulate it less attractively: they voted for Obama in order to feel good about themselves. Which is what “celebrating diversity” boils down to.

As for feelings in general, Obama himself is the perfect emblem of the Age of Empathy. Unlike the hard- faced Bush regime, he “cared.” After all, he told us so. Asked what he’s looking for in a Supreme Court justice, he gave the correct answer: “The depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”⁶⁰

In a TV infomercial a few days before his election, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.”⁶¹

Hmm. Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year.⁶²

If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why can’t he shove a sawbuck and a couple singles in an envelope and double the guy’s income? Ah, well: When Barack Obama claims that “I am my brother’s keeper,” what he means is that the government should be his brother’s keeper. Aside from that, his only religious belief seems to be in his own divinity:

“Do you believe in sin?” Cathleen Falsani, the religion correspondent for the Chicago Sun- Times, asked then Senator Obama.

“Yes,” he replied.

“What is sin?”

“Being out of alignment with my values.”⁶³

That’s one convenient religion: Obama worships at his own personal altar at the First Church of Himself. Unlike Clinton, he can’t feel your pain, but his very presence is your gain—or as he put it in his video address to the German people on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”⁶⁴

Tear down that wall… so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that November 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who led dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who at a critical moment in history decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal; they’re never going to land a photoshoot for GQ. But it’s their day, not yours.

Is all of human history just a bit of colorful backstory in the Barack Obama biopic? “Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur/Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand/the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you.”

If he is not as esteemed in the world’s chancelleries as an American president might have the right to expect, he is at least self-esteemed. He is the ne plus ultra of self-esteem, which may explain why, whenever Obama’s not talking about himself, he sounds like he’s wandered vaguely off-message. You could hardly devise a better jest on the Feeler generation, those Americans reared in the Cult of Empathy, who voted for Obama because he was supposed to embody both their empathy for him and his empathy for all the victims of the heartless Bush regime. Within months, liberal columnists complaining about his “detachment” found themselves confronting the obvious—that whatever they felt for him, he didn’t feel for them. In this Obama was yet again the supreme embodiment of our times: in the Age of Empathy, “feeling good” is better than “doing good”, and feeling good about yourself is best of all.

WE ARE THE WORLD…

In contemporary education’s flight from facts to feelings, “empathy” has become a useful substitute for reality. In the schoolrooms of America, you’ll be asked to empathize with a West African who’s sold into slavery and shipped off to Virginia, or a loyal Japanese-American in a World War II internment camp, or a hapless Native American who catches dysentery, typhoid, gonorrhea, and an early strain of avian flu by foolishly buying beads from Christopher Columbus. This would be a useful exercise if we were genuinely interested in socio-historical empathizing. But instead the compliant pupil is expected merely to acknowledge the unlucky Indian as an early victim of European racism, and to assign the slave a contemporary African-American identity and thereby “empathize” with his sense of injustice. At this level, empathy is no more than the projection of contemporary and local obsessions over the rich canvas of the past and the other.

You didn’t hear the word much a generation back. Now people who would once have sympathized with you insist on claiming to “empathize” with you. As Obama explained to his pro-abortion chums at Planned Parenthood: “We need somebody who’s got the heart—the empathy—to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges. Alright?”⁶⁵

Alright. So let’s take the fourth of those empathetic categories. If you’re paralyzed in a riding accident, I can sympathize at the drop of a hat: my God, that’s awful. Helluva thing to happen. But can I empathize (to quote a definition from David Berger’s Clinical Empathy) “from within the frame of reference of that other person”?

Example: “Driving down there, I remember distinctly thinking that Chris would rather not live than be in this condition.”⁶⁶

That’s Barbara Johnson recalling the immediate aftermath of her son Christopher Reeve’s riding accident. Her instinct was to pull the plug; his was to live. Even the boundlessly empathetic Bill Clinton can’t really “feel your pain.” But the immodesty of the assertion is as pithy a distillation as any other of what’s required in an age of pseudo-empathy.

The first definition in Webster’s gets closer to the reality: “The imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.”

That’s geopolitical empathy as practiced by the western world.

In the December 2007 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan, not yet mired up Sarah Palin’s birth canal without a paddle peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about the maternity of her youngest child, contemplated the ascendancy of Barack Obama and decided that his visage alone would be “the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.”⁶⁷ As he explained: “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm…. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”

I was The Atlantic’s in-house obituarist for some years and I retain an affection for the magazine. But honestly, how could any self-respecting publication pass off such fatuous projection as geopolitical analysis? Let us grant that Mr. Sullivan is genuinely smitten by “Obama’s face” and that his effusions are sufficiently widely shared that they help explain the appeal of a man of minimal accomplishments to a certain type of American liberal whose principal election issue is that he wants to feel good about himself.

Nevertheless, the assumption that “a young Pakistani Muslim” in Karachi or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the laziest kind of projection even by the standards of progressive navel-gazing.

For a start, the new pan-Islamism notwithstanding, there is an awful lot of racism in the Muslim world. If liberals stopped gazing longingly into “Obama’s face” just for a moment, they might recall that little business of genocide in Darfur. What was that about again? Oh, yeah, Sudanese Muslim Arabs were slaughtering Sudanese Muslim Africans. Sure enough, a week after Obama’s election, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two, issued a video denouncing the new president as “abeed al-beit,” which translates literally as “house slave” but