Patrick Lawrence: Becoming Who We Are

The following is an edited, amended, and condensed version of a speech I delivered in Zurich’s environs earlier this month. The occasion was sponsored by Zeit–Fragen, a twice-monthly journal that also comes out in French and English as Horizons et débats and Current Concerns. — P.L. 

What does it mean now, in the spring of 2024, to be … and we can each finish this thought as we wish. What does it mean to be Swiss, or German, or French, or Italian, or American? The answers will be different in their particulars, one case to another, but in the main we are likely to find ourselves in approximately the same place: It is difficult to say with any great confidence now what it means to be who we are. 

We—we in the West—seem to be in a peculiar circumstance of uncertainty on this point. We cannot be quite sure how to answer this question—a question it would not have occurred to us to ask even a few years ago. And we find that to be French, or Italian, or American does not seem to mean quite what we have, as a matter of belief or habit or presumption, for a long time thought it to mean. 

What it means to be American seems to me an especially freighted matter. I honestly cannot tell you straight out what it means to be an American in the year 2024. But this I can say with certainty: It means some things it is not supposed to mean, things I would rather it did not mean. And, I am caused to wonder, given our exceptional circumstances this year, whether being an American has ever truly meant what it is supposed to mean by way of the ideals we Americans profess as the foundation of our identity.  

Is it fair that I say we find ourselves at this point in the 21^st century no longer sure of who we are? I think so. And when I say “we,” I mean we in the West, as I think it is a different story in the non–West. I do not think, to drive home this point, the Chinese, or the Russians, or the Indians, or the South Africans, or Nicaraguans are spending much time, or any time at all, wondering what it means to be who they are. 

One of Nietzsche’s more celebrated aphorisms, and one I have long admired, is very simply “Become who you are.” He meant this in a very personal way—the imperative of the individual to realize the self within, the true self as against the self our societies require us to present, or perform. Spinoza made this point much earlier when he said the hardest thing anyone can do is be who he or she is. I find it useful now to propose that our shared project—we, the people of the West—is to become truly who we are together.     

I mean to say our certainty of ourselves has been dislodged. This is the work of the very extraordinary events amid which we now live. And here I will make a clear distinction. Our idea of ourselves has been shaken by events in which we are implicated and for which we bear responsibility, but this is not all there is to it. Our idea of ourselves has been disturbed as much or even more as we look at ourselves and see how we have responded to these events. To me our discovery of ourselves by way of events and our responses to them is a very powerful source of the disturbance to our consciousness I describe.  

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This question of who we truly are is not new, and I will return to this point. But maybe what needs to be said now is obvious: We in the West are face-to-face with the matter of knowing ourselves in immediate consequence of what we must count the most shocking events so far in our century. I speak primarily of Israel’s barbaric siege of the 2.3 million people who reside in Gaza. Not only does the West, with the United States well in the lead, sponsor and abet Israel’s daily atrocities: How can our nations possibly do this in accordance of who we are supposed to be, we must ask. 

Beyond this there are our responses. Here we must step back to confront ourselves with the very prevalent indifference to these events that is abroad among us. We must honor those many who have demonstrated in London, New York, Washington and other cities, but this does not contradict my point: The vast majority of people in the Western nations have watched what is perpetrated in their names with a shocking apathy. A public opinion poll taken as I prepared these remarks showed that half of those surveyed do not know whether more Palestinians or more Israelis have died since the events of last October. “Most Americans,” the Pew Research Center noted, “report having strong emotional reactions to the Israel–Hamas war. Yet, for the most part, Americans are not paying very close attention to news about the conflict.”

And so we go about our daily lives—watching films, shopping, taking holidays, going out to dinner, and so on as if nothing at all has happened to disturb us. The other day The New York Times ran a headline that asked, “Is it better to brush my teeth before or after breakfast?” There is something obscene publishing such a piece at this time. There is something in it that says not even the most trivial of our concerns is to be set aside as those who purport to lead us sponsor the extermination of an entire people, the starving to death of a people and the complete destruction of their environment so that there is no possibility they can rebuild their lives when the violence ends.  

Here I will interrupt myself to take up the matter of “we.” This is a very complicated pronoun, as it always raises the question, “Who is this ‘we’ to which one refers? It is a fair question, especially as regards Americans, because there is a strong case to be made that there is no “we” among Americans. So I will say now that I use the word as carefully as I can while knowing it is a not-always-satisfactory shorthand.

I do not think I would be discussing these matters with you had Israel’s siege of Gaza not thrown us almost violently into the chaos of a sort of collective identity crisis, wherein we discover—a strong term here—a moral depravity has infected our cultures, our societies. Ukraine is a variant of the problem. We, most of us, have watched as the West—again with the U.S. leading the way—has purposely and relentlessly provoked the Russian Federation to intervene militarily in Ukraine. And most of us, though not all, acquiesce as the leadership on both sides of the Atlantic erases its responsibility for this—which is to say our responsibility—and obliterates history altogether. 

How are we supposed to know who we are if this past, our own past, is taken away from us—or is forbidden us, perhaps a better way to put it? We are in consequence invited to acquiesce as our leadership rejects and aggresses against another nation because this nation does not conform to our reigning ideology. In sum, we are lied to, then we lie to ourselves, and then we accept all the lies. Is this who we are, who we intend to be?

We come to the rise of the non–West altogether—Russia, China, the BRICs nations, and so on—as influential global powers. This turn of history’s wheel       should altogether please leaders in the West. What could be more welcome than new voices and new perspectives on the challenges and tasks facing humanity? And wasn’t the modern project as conceived in the post–1945 years, when scores of nations broke the colonial bond to achieve independence—wasn’t the project to assist developing nations toward material prosperity, institutional stability and an embrace of their own social and cultural identities?

Now, at the moment of fruition, as non–Western nations are emergent in just these ways, our leaders in the West simply cannot handle it. They are barely able to acknowledge what is before our eyes even if we watch from our kitchen tables. And when our policy cliques do show signs of understanding this phenomenon, it is typically because they have taken one or another action to thwart the very progress they purport to encourage. 

The issue here is the West’s long-standing claim to superiority over the non–West, which is to say most of humanity. This assertion of superiority is half a millennium old, and our leaders simply cannot surrender it. Do they speak for us, too? I have long wondered this. Is the West’s claim to global primacy, however offensive we may find it in our conscious thoughts, also part of who we are?   

How did we get here? How did we reach the point these questions press upon us? What is it we wish to be and accomplish in the 21^st century?

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Thorstein Veblen, the celebrated Norwegian–American sociologist and economist, and a vigorous critic of modern capitalism, made an arresting observation in the first pages of The Vested Interests, a slim and often overlooked volume he published in 1919. A given age professes to hold high the ideals of the previous age long after the current age has ceased to live by or honor these ideals in practice, in its way of life. To honor ideals becomes in this way something of a ritual—it is merely performative. A good example, and I think Veblen cites it, are the ideals of the Enlightenment—the primacy of reason and of humanism, individual emancipation, the spread of knowledge, tolerance, the right of each of us to “the pursuit of happiness,” as America’s Declaration of Independence phrases it. 

These ideals were vigorously professed during the age that followed, the Age of Materialism, just as we profess them now. But the rise of materialist civilization has taken us in another direction, to put the point mildly. In The Vested Interests Veblen addressed the characteristics of an automated and dehumanizing civilization, and the psychological and sociological effects on the individual of technological advance. The vested interests of his title, he observed, concerned themselves with obtaining the maximum gain in exchange for the minimum given in return. Veblen identifies this as the ruling principle of his time and names it “self-interest.” Law, custom, a shared belief in the human cause—all this could be ignored, or was available to be abused, in the cause of this highest of modern values. Most human interactions were reduced to bargaining: They were as they are now: transactional.  

Our leaders are remarkably faithful to the pattern Veblen identified. Listen to any speech President Biden gives: It overflows with worn-out platitudes that have nothing to do with what America under Joe Biden does either at home or abroad. There is also the case of what is called “R2P,” “the responsibility to protect.” We, the enlightened nations of the world, have a duty to protect others from such catastrophes as genocide, starvation, ethnic-cleansing and other such crimes against humanity. R2P licenses “humanitarian interventions.” This is now accepted as a guiding principle among the Western nations.

And look at the record of such interventions—in Libya, in Syria, in parts of Africa, in the former Yugoslavia. What is humanitarian in any of them? Humanitarianism is the ritual pretense—the old ideal dishonestly professed in the present. Turning this matter upside-down, where is the humanitarian intervention to protect the people of Gaza from the savagery of the Israel Defense Forces? 

At bottom these actions and inactions reflect the value at the core of self-interest: This is the assertion of power. I cannot imagine Veblen had in mind anything like the question we address today when he wrote The Vested Interests, but he more or less pushes our faces into our question: If we are not who we purport to be, who are we in fact? If self-interest involves, in all cases I can think of, the assertion of power in one or another form, it is the pursuit and use of power that most clearly tells us who we have become in this third decade of the 21^st century—who we have become, I mean to say, as against who we truly are. 

Those regimes that rely on propaganda to present themselves to their people and to the world ultimately make themselves in the image of their propaganda. This is also true of the societies they govern or rule: These societies assume the character of the propaganda imagery fashioned to present them. This is our condition. We live in a sort of meta-reality, as I term it—a world made of images. And so we are at sea. And so it occurs to us to ask our question: What does it mean to be…? 

I will address my American case in reply to this question. It is very particular in many ways, because the contradictions we find in America between what we think we are and who we are in fact are the sharpest of any in the West. The unbridled pursuit of power has devastated American society. We retain the forms of the society we think we live in, but there is little reality to them. Our political process is more or less broken, and I think we can probably do without “more or less.” Many of our institutions are decayed or decaying—our federal and state legislatures, our courts, our law-enforcement agencies. The radical over-corporatization of the American economy presents us with another form of power. Self-interest in the economic sphere subjects Americans to the orthodoxies of a very unforgiving form of neoliberalism. This ideology has impoverished many scores of millions and devastated our middle class. 

As to America’s conduct abroad, President Biden still speaks of the U.S. as “the light of the world,” but again, you see just how right Veblen was a century ago in the matter of hollowed-out ideals and their distance from reality. To obscure the gap between the intent of U.S. policy as we pretend it to be and what its intent actually is, our very history is obliterated. If a life-giving connection to the past is essential for a society to know itself and be true to what it aspires to be, we have lost any such connection.

Even our language is corrupted. This cannot be a surprise, for to impose the language of empire is essential as a means of controlling the public. So are we rendered incapable of speaking of things as they are rather than in obscuring euphemisms—“cotton-wool English,” as I call it. As a measure of how effective this manipulation of language is, those who control our language are able to tell us that things we witness before our eyes are not as we see them. It is diabolic, but how often do we find that people are inclined to believe what they are told rather than what they see.  

This résumé of the American condition is very brief. But I describe, in short, a people who have very little idea of who they truly are.  

As I mentioned earlier, this social and cultural malady, as I may as well call it, is not so new as we may assume. It is tempting to think the events I have noted have led us into this state. But this is a self-deception, in my view. Israel’s siege of Gaza can certainly be counted a rupture in that it touches a depth of depravity and criminality that is unprecedented so far in the 21^st century for its sheer inhumanity and immorality.

But the true rupture has a long history. And as we look squarely at it we are called upon to acknowledge that for the whole of the post–1945 era—from Hiroshima and Nagasaki through Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and I had better stop this list here, for it will take up the rest of my time with you if I continue with it—we have not been who we have convinced ourselves we are. Israel, in short, is at bottom not a cause of anything but an outcome. There is nothing at all in what it now does to Palestinians that America and usually the rest of the West has not done to many others in many different circumstances.  

Again speaking as an American of America, we are a lapsed people. Morally, spiritually, ethically, institutionally—we are lapsed in that we have brought ourselves so low as to believe no longer in anything but our own self-interest.

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“No nation survives the loss of its ruling elite,” Toynbee wrote in A study of history. And elsewhere in that immense work: “A society does not ever die from ‘natural causes,’ but always dies from suicide or murder—and nearly always the former.”

I find these passages pertinent to our question. America has lost its elite, I would say, if we mean by this it has lost it to corruption and the collapse of its principles in its craven lust for power. In this way this elite has committed a kind of suicide in that it will not survive its own corruptions indefinitely. 

But let us stay away from the thought that American society as a whole must be counted a suicide. For as Israel brings us face to face with our record, our responsibilities, and our ennui, as I will call it, we also see a certain recoil from what we witness, and, among some of us, there is a growing awareness that when we look at Israel we see ourselves and do not accept what we see. As one of my readers put it the other day in the comment thread appended to one of my commentaries, “The flip side of this coin: Sanity is being restored.”

I do not think we can look to our leadership, such as we have it now, to carry forward any such restoration project as my reader suggests. If we are to restore ourselves to sanity, we Americans, the endeavor must begin with each of us. 

As to a beginning, now that I have mentioned this, I return to the topic of language. To think, speak, and write in our own language is how we reject the language of empire, wherein authentic meaning is forbidden. Language, to put this point another way, is the first site of our reassertion of ourselves as we truly are and mean to be. It is in our language, to go back again to Nietzsche’s imperative, that we begin the long work of becoming who we are.   

It is well-known and often said that America has never lived up to its ideals. But this is not to say America’s ideals are not to be striven for. To put my concluding point today in the context of this history, it is ours now to advance genuinely toward our unachieved ideals, to treat them as something more than objects of ritual as Veblen saw them to be—to give them substance, again or for the first time. 

I do not wish to appear unduly idealistic. I speak of ideals of necessity because those who lead us have none and have shown us what it is like to live and act without any. In this way I am prompted to say the presence of ideals is a necessity for any people or for any society that aspires to live honorably, ethically, humanely —altogether for the human cause. 

This restoration I speak of is our chance, in this long, large work, to know again, or maybe know for the first time, who we truly are—to create a collective identity in which we are authentically present. The French existentialists insisted that living is a continuous act of becoming. Isn’t this as true of societies and nations as it is for each of us?