About 10-15 years ago I met a woman online in a chat room who was a grade school teacher. The science of education has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, so we got to talking about what she was teaching. She told me that the new curriculum adopted that year included multi-culturalism. She explained it as not just teaching kids about other cultures and governments and so on, but that all are equal - no one or no thing is superior to any other. All the countries of the world are just like different flavors ice cream at the Baskin Robbins. Some people like chocolate, some vanilla, some Rocky Road, etc.
I couldn't believe my eyes as she typed, I literally thought she was kidding. So I challenged her. But she wasn't. "What about fascism?" I exclaimed. "You are teaching kids that a fascist dictatorship and representative republic w/ capitalism are just two different ways to run a country?" Yep. "Then how do you explain the failure that was Nazi Germany?" Well, those were just the wrong people trying to run things. I was aghast -- as if there were a "right person" to be a fascist dictator.
The next day I was telling the story to a group of co-workers at lunch - all of us computer scientists and engineers. They couldn't believe it either, except one. One in the group had raised kids to high school age at the time. He told a story about how his kids essentially learned two versions of history. The junk from the public schools and what he taught them on his own. They were lucky to be smart enough to regurgitate the junk to the teacher to get good grades and understand the truth about why things unfolded the way they did.
I posed a question to the group. "Imagine what this country will be like in 2 or 3 or 4 generations when all that's left alive are people who've not just forgotten what American exceptionalism means, but were never even introduced to the idea." My friend from Belgium chimed in, "You know, I love this country, I've travelled the world and would live nowhere else, but that American exceptionalism is a bunch of crap. You aren't better than me just because you were born here. You were just lucky."
No, no, that's not what it means at all.
"Yes, yes, you Americans think you are better than everyone else."
My explanation went something like this:
True, some people do but that's just arrogance. That has nothing to do with American exceptionalism at all.
This country was founded on the core principle that human rights are transferred from the Creator, by whatever name or form you chose to believe in (or even not), directly to each and every human being merely as a consequence of being human. Before that, every country and kingdom operated as if rights were granted to the king or queen or dictator, whatever the government and then they decided which rights were to go to which people. The head monarch got the most, the dukes and duchesses got less, the peasants got little and so on. The inequities of the class system was the consequence of this wrong-headed belief that it was some human's job to decide what human rights went where.
Before the English philosopher and author John Locke put his noodle to the problems of what was modern day government to him in the 1600's, everyone pretty much assumed that's the way things would always work, because they had always worked that way (since man became civilized into societies) and therefore they should always work that way. God save the (in this case) Queen!"
Locke through a series of "use cases" (a computer science term) not only highlighted the inherent flaws of things such as power passing from father to son in a "royal family," but also he postulated a better solution. A solution, essentially that we call the USA. Our Founders understood Locke, improved on his floor plan, so to speak, and put the grand experiment into motion decades later. They even borrowed some of his language, with some adjustments - "Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness." Thank you, Johnny!
Never before was a country founded with the understanding that the government is the servant of the people. The power to govern is loaned to the governing by the governed. Many countries still today don't have a document that does what our Constitution does - defines the contract between the government and the citizenry - that limits the powers of government.
Integrate in with that form of government the economic system known as free market capitalism and suddenly you have what's been called the land of opportunity. But that's not the end of the story.
The pieces of this puzzle didn't just randomly fall into place from nowhere. They each developed little by little over thousands of years. Even what seems to us as a simple and obvious notion such as "personal property" developed over thousands of years. Land ownership? That's only been around for a few thousand years. Locke didn't dream up new stuff completely from scratch. He needed to understand the Magna Carta for example. Millennia of often great violence and chaos preceded what our Founders had, but it all played a role in getting everything to come together just right to allow the USA to happen as it did.
American exceptionalism isn't the belief that we're better than everyone else. American exceptionalism is the belief that the debt we owe to the countless number of people over the centuries who sacrificed blood and treasure to help inch humanity along the civilization scale is that we must, personally, each as individuals, strive to be exceptional at whatever it is we chose to do. Banker or barber. Congressman or carpenter. Doctor or doorman.
The table has been set by the sacrifice and accomplishment of those before you so you can be exceptional and so you must strive to be. It's your sacred duty not as an American or as a capitalist, but as a member of the human race. Through your individual accomplishments you in turn inch humanity forward.
Unless you turn away and let everyone down. And everyone is not just those from the distant and recent past, but also those of the present and even of the future. If you fail to strive to be exceptional when everything was put in place for you, then you fail to make the world a better place for everyone now and you fail to move humanity even further along the civilization scale. You fail also the Creator. You squander the human rights the Creator conferred to you when you joined the human race when you take no more initiative to achieve than the people a thousand years ago living as serfs to the King took.
When you adopt the role of victim, you might as well have been a serf to a European Monarch before the Renaissance tilling his soil. When you chose to believe government owes you food and shelter and medicine, you might as well have been a slave to an Egyptian Pharaoh building a pyramid. Slaves had all that. They had no choices. People in the USA have freedom and liberty.
Exceptionalism is the belief that it's your sacred duty to all humanity to make personal choices to strive to be exceptional. America is where that happens most and best. At least it is today.
American exceptionalism does not mean no one anywhere else can be or should be or is exceptional. It means when people elsewhere strive for and achieve an exceptional life, it's even more remarkable, because they probably overcame minor or major hardships to do it. No one with half a brain begrudges the Somali widow with 7 kids and one arm who walks 3 miles round trip twice a day to get marginally clean water for not producing great poetry that inspires the human spirit. For her, exceptional is to not raise her 7 kids to hate the drug lords who run the town or the 12 year old "soldier" who killed their father with the Kalashnikov to earn his "stripes." For her, exceptional is to raise her kids to not hate even the comfortable people around the world who could rescue them from abject poverty and hopelessness, but don't, because it's more convenient to just look the other way. To not wallow in despair in the face of a lifetime of unending hopelessness, that's exceptional. To know and give love amidst chaos and fear and oppression, is exceptional. No one with half a heart begrudges the Somali woman if she doesn't or isn't; she's barely surviving.
American exceptionalism is not a prize given to those lucky enough to be born or live in the USA. It's a challenge. It's a call to action, not just live out your life without breaking any laws kind of action. Nothing short of grand, earth-shaking, big action that moves the human condition of billions forward cashes the check and pays homage to the exceptional who have come before us. Be the next John Locke. Write the next document that brings clarity and peace and inspires the next four centuries worth of humans.
As we finished up lunch a man who was apparently sitting in earshot stopped by on his way out and said, "Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn't help overhearing what you were talking about. I don't know if you know this, but Rush Limbaugh has an explanation of American Exceptionalism that is good, but not as good as yours. You should send it too him."
Sure, I thought, call him up and get a busy signal for the next 10 years. Write him, so it can get ignored like millions of others. Yada, yada.
Then last Friday (9/14/13) I heard Rush explain American exceptionalism on the radio in my car. The stranger was right. My explanation is superior. It's not that Rush is wrong, he just stops short. He stops with the fact that "the way America was founded (freedom, liberty, role of government, etc) makes it the exception." But a fact isn't an "ism." Only a belief can be an "ism." An "ism" needs a fundamental core belief from which everything else derives. What those facts mean to each of us individually as a member of humanity is the foundation of the "ism."
I called Rush. Got a busy signal. Again.
@DanFarfan
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