Google it.
It’s all right there: the campaign to destroy old customs, culture, habits and ideas.
Among the victories of the campaign against the old are to assign new names to city streets and places. Various historical sites throughout the country are destroyed. Historically significant artifacts and statues are destroyed.
The old habits and ideas are contrasted with new ones. The idea that the old culture is responsible for backwardness and exploitation is a given.
Other manifestations of the campaign include giving speeches, harassing people and desecration of the dead. Codes of conduct are enforced, or at least attempts to do so are undertaken.
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Does some of the above resonate? It may come off with a sharper edge than the current cultural campaign, but it rings familiar, no? The struggle against the old, the statues, the names; the assumption of pervasive, all embracing exploitation; the need for new codes of conduct.
Much of the above is taken — verbatim —from the Google entry under the Cultural Revolution in China, 1966-1976. In this upheaval, tens of millions of people were forcibly uprooted, killed, brainwashed or laid under intellectual siege. The Cultural Revolution called for the destruction of the “Four Olds” and proceeded to do just that. In the process, the economy, as we would say today, tanked.
Nothing so radical is sweeping across the United States. But the resemblance in terminology and the enforcement of conformity, albeit much less intensively, are alarming.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution was grounded in a supposed infiltration of capitalism in China, not in racism. Nor is there any similarity in its scope and ferocity to the eruption in America of the demand for cultural uniformity in political discourse, and of the revision of American history as having conceived, created and nurtured the safest, freest political system known to history.
“Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons” read an editorial headline in the People’s Daily in China in 1966. We would regard that headline as substantively wrong because it referred to capitalism, democracy and what we enshrine in the Bill of Rights. But the “sweep away” locution is shockingly familiar.
It is not only the sweeping away of racism per se that now sweeps the country; it is something more. It is the demand for posthumous perfection. If any American figure ever failed morally, then no nuanced evaluation of this figure’s role in history is to be countenanced. Down with George Washington. Down with Thomas Jefferson. As if, within any given person or historical period, anyone can entirely escape his time and place.
Ironically, those who would erase the author of the Declaration of Independence because he was a slaveholder fail to realize that a future generation, judging from within its own cultural limitations, will erase Jefferson’s current critics. Today’s politically correct dogma soon enough becomes tomorrow’s anathema. Even Abraham Lincoln is not exempt from the current, simplisic revisionism.
The greatness of America is not that it is perfect, nor that its founders were perfect, nor that its ideals were always upheld even by the authors of these ideals, nor that it has been free of hypocrisy or oppression, nor that American history is free of ugly episodes, nor that there does not remain much to improve. The greatness of American is this: No other political system in history has been in principle and in practice more protective of human rights and safety, and more influential in spreading these ideals across the world.
More alarming than the particulars on the agenda of the new, regnant penchant for conformism is the mode of thought itself. What has made America great is its hospitality to innovation, politically, intellectually, economically and technologically. If people are literally or figuratively shouted down for offering an opinion, not an opinion grounded in hate but in difference of perspective, then that innovation will stop. The country will lose its preeminent position.
Imagine this scenario: Thomas Jefferson presents the Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress. With heated words and in a sarcastic tone, a member of the Congress stand ups and says: “Very nice, Jefferson. Beautiful words. Yeah, created equal. But you own slaves. Tear your document up until you clean up your own house. Go home! Save us your hypocritical musings!” To that there is an eruption of mass applause and Jefferson goes home, the Declaration of Independence relegated to the trash, never published.
That, in essence, is what the cultural revolution of today in America demands. In a revision of Murphy’s law, no good idea goes unpunished. If its author is imperfect, his idea is dispensable.
Ethicists debate whether perfection of the work or perfection of the life is superior. Surely, Judaism believes in perfection of the life. Personal integrity. Flight from hypocrisy. Yet, hypocrisy is a universal reality because pefection is a universal impossibility. Which means: Yes, revisit the sordid segments of American history. Yes, make the necessary improvements. Yes, face national failures, current and past, unflinchingly. And yes — all this, with perspective; with appreciation for the remarkable dimensions of American success; with humility, given the complexity of human history, human progress and human nature, including our own.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
