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December 18, 2008
Exclusive: Horsefeathers’ Henny-Penny Award Goes To…(June 12, 2004)
Samuel P. Huntington, Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard and chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, must be a man who rarely smiles. You have only to scan the list of titles – perhaps a dozen – of which he is author or editor to know that the man is a cosmic worrier.
His earlier work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, clearly boosted him to the very top of the pile of hypochondriacs of international affairs. He monitors every war cloud and every religious protest in the most far flung regions of the globe. He can tell you how many civil wars are going on at any given minute everywhere on earth. He attends to every cultural hiccough, every political belch, every population twitch, and entertains fearful scenarios of international ill health.
It is certainly a good thing that there are men about like Professor Huntington with such a worrisome nature, and such encyclopedic knowledge and scope. We need to be kept alert about the political catastrophes of future generations.
In his new book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Professor Huntington takes the temperature of America’s psyche and finds the nation feverish and ready to fall apart.
Professor Huntington’s first task is to identify who we were as a nation, and how we got to be who we are now. From its origins in the hearts and minds of our 18th-century founders America has been and continues to be an Anglo-Protestant culture; the latter is the central and lasting source of all of the component characteristics we call the American Creed.
Eighteenth-century Protestantism should not be mistaken for WASP Episcopalianism, which is closer to Catholicism than the faith of our founding fathers. America is the child of the Reformation and the English Puritan Revolution. It was founded as a succession of Protestant fragments, a process that was underway in seventeenth-century England even before Locke was born.
The American brand of Protestantism is rooted in dissent from established religion. This was noted by Edmund Burke: The Americans “are Protestants and of that kind which is most averse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
Contrary to the common belief of the igno-historical liberal warrior, almost all the central ideas of what Huntington calls the American Creed – the essence of American identity – have their origins in our religious past: dissenting Protestantism. Our core beliefs entail the sacred rights of the individual, the people as a source of political power, government limited by law and the people, a preference for local over national government, and the less government the better.
All of these are to be found in the principles and mores of Protestantism: the Protestant emphasis on individual conscience and responsibility; the work ethic and the responsibility of the individual for his own success or failure in life; congregational forms of church organization – all these fostered opposition to hierarchy and favored democratic government.
The American creed is the unique creation of a dissenting Protestant culture and it is the mechanism that has been ticking away since the eighteenth century, keeping things on track – until the ‘60s, that is. Beginning then, Huntington says, the principle beliefs that have kept America “America” began to be subverted by social and cultural trends like affirmative action and quota programs in schools and business; the rise of bilingualism; the substitution of multiculturalism for a sense of and interest in our national history; and, most troubling of all, a powerful tendency for new immigrants from the Latin American countries south of the United States to resist assimilation of American values, and form large, extensive communities with increasingly powerful voting blocs and pressure groups.
Professor Huntington is most worried about the challenge of Mexican immigration. Because of its contiguity, Mexico is a constant and increasing source of legal and illegal immigrants, who he feels neither share the American ethic nor want to. Hispanics in 2000 were 12% of the population and two thirds of those were Mexican. It is expected that by 2080 Hispanics will represent 25% of the population. They appear to be less interested than immigrants of the past in assimilating and dispersing into America, but rather take comfort in the area of the country which was once Mexico. There they will settle, Professor Huntington frets, as Spanish-speaking undigested communities transforming the American Creed into a Hispanic one. We will be changed, he fears, from a people who say “Let’s roll!” to one that will say “Manana…manana…”
One can only admire Professor H for the depth and scope of his scholarship, but it is clear that the man suffers from a Cassandra complex. He seems at his most animated as he molds the facts he has collected, all individually plausible, into some catastrophic scenario which strains credulity. “Mexican-Americans, in turn, argue that the Southwest was taken from them by military aggression in the 1840s, and that the time for la reconquista has arrived. Demographically, socially, and culturally that is well under way.
“Conceivably this could lead to a move to reunite these territories with Mexico. That seems unlikely, but Professor Charles Truxillo of the University of New Mexico predicts that by 2080 the southwestern states of the United States and the northern states of Mexico will come together to form a new country, “La Republica del Norte.” The basis for such a development exists in the surge of Mexicans northward and the increasing economic ties between communities on different sides of the border.”
Can you just imagine how the proposed name change from the Dallas Cowboys to the Durango Bandidos would go over? Or the change from Arizona Diamondbacks to the Pueblo Chihuahuas? Really, Professor.
It isn’t that Professor Huntington is wrong about all of the various threats to American identity – the rise of transnationalism amongst the elites, multiculturalism, anti-patriotic attitudes among liberal intellectuals, bilingualism. He is quite right about their existence and their opportunities for expansion. The problem is that he cannot resist over-generalizing into a state of Henny-Penny-The-Sky-Is-Falling panic and playing the futurologist. As the quotation above suggests, Professor Huntington is no small-time thinker. He is addicted to making epochal predictions, seeing trends far into the future. Unfortunately, life is largely unpredictable over long periods of time.
Who, In 1932, could have told that the United States would be involved in a war in less than ten years later that would change the national configuration of the world? Who, in 1949, could have predicted that an American would walk on the moon in 1969? Who, in 1981, would have said that the Soviet Empire would be dead in 1991? Sorry, Professor, but, except for death and taxes, we’re lucky if we can predict tomorrow’s weather.
There’s a more serious problem with Professor Huntington’s view of the world. He tends to underestimate the powerful cyclical nature of things. Nature and human nature, when they encounter extreme situations, tend to react automatically in ways that will correct the extreme situation. That’s the way the stock and all other markets work. That is the way the human body works. That’s the way politics works. There are different names for this principle of self-correction depending on the context – the principle of homeostasis, the principle of constancy, the principle of regression to the mean – but they all describe the tendency in living beings to correct for extreme situations, whether these are caused by error or external factors.
Things don’t stay the same, Professor. When they get bad enough human beings will do something to change them for the better – you can bet on it.
A case in point is Graciela Diaz, an illegal immigrant from Jalisco, Mexico, who, if Professor Huntington’s predictions were true, would be on welfare, draining American resources, speaking Spanish and encouraging her child to speak Spanish, living a life-style of Mexican manana. But somehow or other Ms. Diaz could not remain true to Professor Huntington’s stereotype, and today she earns $40,000 a year, is married, owns a $100,000 house with a two- car garage (that holds her two cars) in a gated community. She still speaks ungrammatical English, but her husband tells her daughter to do everything the teacher says because one day she’s going to be somebody. The Diazes want her to go to college and maybe law or architecture school.
America’s identity has been challenged since it began. We chose not to be a slave-holding nation; our intellectual elites have besieged us to become anarchists, communists, socialists, feminists, gay, and Lord knows what else. In the end we have remained remarkably like ourselves and no doubt, despite Professor Huntington’s dire warnings, we will continue to be us.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Yale Kramer, a former faculty member and graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, psychoanalyst and former Clinical Professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is the author of Talking Back to Liberal Power. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, American Spectator and The Public Interest.
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