Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

My parents always thought I would do something special. They told me so. Without reflection, it produced a kind of hubris from which I am still recovering.

There is a particular kind of pride that does not know itself as pride. It does not swagger. It does not boast openly. It presents itself, instead, as burden — as the weight of responsibility that falls on those who are uniquely good, uniquely free, uniquely chosen to carry the light of civilization into a darkened world.

This is the pride of American exceptionalism. It is one of the more dangerous spiritual formations in the modern world.

With a caveat…. There is a reflexive anti-Americanism that is as intellectually lazy as the exceptionalism it claims to oppose. It simply inverts the myth: where exceptionalism sees a city on a hill, its mirror image sees only an empire of violence. Neither posture requires the discomfort of genuine thought. Neither asks the harder question: what does it mean when a nation’s virtues and its violence are not opposed, but structurally entangled?

With Donald Trump threatening war crimes, and as Israel is committing them in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, perhaps this is the question of the day.

The Self-Immunizing Belief

The theological tradition has a word for the condition I am describing: hubris. But hubris is commonly misunderstood. It is not simply arrogance. It is the inflation of the partial into the absolute — the moment when a genuinely good thing becomes a totalizing claim. The ancient Greeks saw hubris as the specific blindness of those who were, in some meaningful sense, actually great. It was not the delusion of the weak. It was the ruin of the strong.

Reinhold Niebuhr identified this structure with devastating precision in his diagnosis of mid-century American power. America had real virtues, he acknowledged. Its commitments to liberty, to democratic life, to human dignity — these were not simply propaganda. They were genuinely held. But it was precisely because they were genuinely held that America became vulnerable to a specific and profound error: the mistake of treating its own historical position, its own interests, its own power, as though they were synonymous with the purposes of God.

What makes this spiritually dangerous is not the error itself. All finite creatures make errors. What makes it dangerous is the structural immunity to correction that the error produces. If America is, by definition, a force for good — if the city on a hill cannot, by its very nature, be doing evil — then the evidence of harm must always be reinterpreted. It must be reframed as necessity, as tragedy, as regrettable but unavoidable. The prior conviction of innocence absorbs and neutralizes every counter-witness.

This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is something more serious: a trained incapacity to see, reproduced across generations, that functions as a genuine pathology of the moral imagination.

The Cost of Innocence

James Baldwin named the same disease from a different angle. He argued that the white American identity had been constructed, in significant part, through a deliberate act of not-knowing — a willed innocence about what had been done to build the world Americans inhabited. The psychological cost of maintaining that innocence, he argued, was a progressive deadening: a shrinking of the capacity for genuine feeling, genuine encounter, genuine self-knowledge.

Baldwin was writing about race. But the logic extends. A nation that cannot acknowledge what it has done to others cannot fully know itself. And a nation that cannot know itself cannot genuinely repent, cannot genuinely change, cannot genuinely become what it claims to be.

This is the spiritual stakes of the question.

Consider the arc that runs from Sherman’s deliberate destruction of the civilian infrastructure of the American South, through the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through the near-total bombing of North Korea — a campaign that, by General Curtis LeMay’s own accounting, killed roughly one-fifth of the population — through the herbicidal devastation of Vietnam’s agricultural land, through the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s water and power systems in 1991, and its aftermath. In each case, the harm inflicted was catastrophic and overwhelmingly borne by civilian populations. In each case, the harm was narrated, at the time and subsequently, as reluctant necessity in service of a larger good.

The pattern is not incidental. It is structural. Each act of civilizational harm is metabolized by the myth of exceptionalism and converted into evidence of American seriousness, American resolve, American willingness to bear the weight of world-historical responsibility. The victims become, at best, unfortunate costs. The perpetrators remain, in their own self-understanding, the good guys.

When the Sacralized Cannot Be Questioned

Niebuhr warned that a nation which cannot distinguish between its own interests and God’s will has removed the last external check on its own violence. This is the spiritual mechanism at work. When a cause is sacralized — when it is elevated beyond the reach of ordinary moral scrutiny — the means it employs acquire a borrowed sanctity. They cannot be questioned without appearing to question the cause itself.

This is why the prophetic tradition, in its most searching moments, has always made the people of God its primary object of critique. The Hebrew prophets did not reserve their most searching condemnation for Israel’s enemies. They directed it at Israel. Not because Israel was uniquely wicked, but because Israel was uniquely positioned to understand the difference between what it claimed to be and what it was doing.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. His 1967 speech on Vietnam is still startling in its directness. He did not condemn American violence from the outside, as a disappointed foreigner might. He condemned it from within, as a heartbroken citizen naming a betrayal of the nation’s own deepest professed commitments. The spiritual disease, in his diagnosis, was not that America lacked ideals. It was that America had learned to use its ideals as cover for their opposite — to deploy the language of freedom in the service of domination, the language of peace in the service of destruction.

That is a more precise description of the pathology than simple hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the gap between what one says and what one does, while inwardly knowing the difference. What King was naming was something more disturbing: a condition in which the gap has been closed not by moral progress, but by ideological closure — by the systematic inability to recognize the gap at all.

The Nakedness of the Present Moment

What feels different about the present moment is a certain stripping away of the narrative machinery that has historically managed this gap. When a leader declares openly, on social media, before a deadline, that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the work of laundering — of converting the threat into the language of reluctant necessity and world-historical responsibility — becomes harder.

The threat and the ideal are simultaneously present, nakedly juxtaposed.

It would be a mistake, however, to treat this nakedness as simply a symptom of one man’s particular pathology. The historical record suggests it is better understood as a surfacing: a moment when what has long been operational policy becomes, briefly, impossible to euphemize.

Charles Taylor has written about the social imaginary: the largely unspoken frameworks through which a society understands itself, its relationships, its place in time. American exceptionalism functions as precisely this: not a theory that Americans explicitly hold and consciously defend, but a background assumption so deep that it shapes perception before reflection begins. It determines what counts as news and what is normalized, what produces outrage and what is absorbed as the ordinary cost of power.

The spiritual work required is the cultivation of a different imaginary and it is genuine spiritual work, not merely political analysis. One that can hold the real achievements of American democratic life and the real history of American violence without collapsing the tension prematurely in either direction.

Toward Honest Reckoning

Germany has a word for this work: Vergangenheitsbewältigung — the struggle to come to terms with the past. It is not a completed project in Germany either. But the concept exists. The cultural and institutional infrastructure for self-examination, however imperfect, has been built. The struggle is named and recognized as necessary.

The analogous struggle in America has been episodic, contested, and repeatedly foreclosed by the very exceptionalism that makes it necessary. Every serious attempt at reckoning has been met with the insistence that to name these things is to betray America, to give comfort to its enemies, to undermine the project itself, such as with with slavery, with Native dispossession, with the history of overseas violence .

But this insistence is itself the disease. A self that cannot acknowledge its shadow cannot integrate it. It remains split; it is capable of genuine idealism and catastrophic harm in the same breath, without the inner coherence that would allow it to understand the relationship between the two.

The prophetic traditions (Jewish, Christian, Indigenous) that have always existed within American life have consistently named this. They have insisted that genuine greatness requires honest self-knowledge. That the city on a hill, if it is to mean anything, must be able to see itself clearly, including its shadow.

That seeing is not comfortable. But it is, in every tradition that takes spiritual life seriously, the beginning of the only freedom worth having.