America viewed the Arab Spring and saw its own beloved idea acting in history to overcome geographic, political-economic, ethnic, and religious facticity, in short overcoming history itself, in accordance with liberal-democratic prophecy and the new order of the ages, the basis for American “exceptionalism” as faith, ideology, and, equally and interdependently, functional system of government. Americans saw, could not help but to see, and were not simply wrong to see the mirror images of their sacred secular ideal, the irresistibly resplendent light of the promise of freedom, in the series of uprisings, stirrings of the holy popular sovereign, against seemingly interchangeable tyrants. Specifically on Syria, the expectation of Assad’s imminent fall was natural for all true believers, and not to be a true believer on this matter is to declare oneself only an equivocal liberal-democrat or progressive or American patriot at all. Upon discovery of the apparent failure of faith, the believer withdraws or looks away – if only under an adjustment in time horizons – rather than undergo self-doubt: We will always prefer to doubt the others. So, America now or again looks away from Libya, and Egypt, and Syria, and Iraq, and Israel or Israel-Palestine, and forgets whatever it needs to forget in order to continue to believe in itself, and continue to live as it prefers, which are the same thing for America. In ignoring the geographic, political-economic, ethnic, religious impediments to the universalization of the human idea, Americans repeat those ineluctably pleasing, necessary operations of the spirit that tell us our luck – or the sum of our combined advantages in relation to geography, politics, economics, ethnicities, and religions – is deserved, a product of our virtues and a proof of them, whatever costs to others not only unavoidable, but just.
Also “young enough to go ahead anyway.”
Writing about French colonial history (in any extended abstract, the rest behind a paywall) our erstwhile virtual commenter, Ann Laura Stoller, proposes using aphasia a metaphor.
As an aphasiac I find this apt and appealing. Cognitive dissonance seems handy, but perhaps not quite “there”. Part of many experience of aphasia is a difficulty/impossibility in expressing not necessarily thoughts in general (ie global aphasia), but thoughts in specific times and situations. The term “global aphasia” then becomes here not just a general difficulty/impossibility in speaking, but difficulty/impossibility speaking about certain global situations.