The Oppositional Mindset

Katherine Kersten, writing in First Things notes that many Americans today are in the grip of what she calls an "oppositional mentality" that has created an "adversary culture" in which very nearly every aspect of American culture is subject to criticism and condemnation.

Kersten points out that it's a striking fact about this that,

those who have tenure at elite universities, run foundations that award fellowships to artists, staff government bureaucracies, and control our media speak of themselves as “countercultural” when, in truth, they are at the center of contemporary culture-making. This is a central feature of the adversary culture: It sustains the “oppositional self,” which feeds on critical denunciation of the status quo.

In other words, those who manifest oppositional self often condemn the very institutions that provide them a livelihood.

What particularly arrested my interest in her essay, though, was her explanation of why people develop an "oppositional self" in the first place. She borrows heavily from sociologist Paul Hollander who, she explains,

came to the United States after escaping from communist Hungary in 1956. Having first-hand experience with a totalitarian regime, he was baffled to encounter American intellectuals who were sympathetic to communism and endorsed its revolutionary aims. Some even championed Stalin, Castro, and Mao.

Hollander saw that they [American intellectuals] were captive to an oppositional habit of mind, which led them toward a hypercritical repudiation of our nation’s institutions. Worse, this habit of mind led them to misperceive and idealize systems like the one he had fled, while overlooking or denying the virtues of their own society.

It is indeed a matter of no little psychological interest that so many Americans hold totalitarian tyrannies in high esteem while demanding that the freedoms that generations of Americans cherished, fought and died for be curtailed or done away with altogether. People around the globe are imprisoned and tortured because they would dearly love to have for themselves the very freedoms - freedom of speech and religion, for example - that so many Americans regard with comntempt.

Kersten goes on to write that,

Today, the hyper-critical mindset is so widespread that it has become, as Hollander described it, “a diffuse sensibility, a predisposition rather than a clearly thought-out ideological or philosophical position.” For people socialized into it, this mindset amounts to a new form of conventional wisdom: “instinctive, intuitive, non-intellectual—as all profoundly held cultural (or subcultural) beliefs are.”

Thus our odd situation: Mayors, college presidents, corporate leaders, and media titans express paradoxically conventional and “establishment” affirmations of revolutionary causes.

Hollander recognized that political commitments often spring from deeper, unarticulated, non-political sources. In his words, “predisposition influences perception.” The moralistic crusades undertaken by people whose positions in life put them at a great distance from the issues they claim to care about are often not so much about a search for justice as a working out of their personal needs and dissatisfactions.

The oppositional mindset, Hollander avers, is often a result of a deep dissatisfaction and emptiness in the soul of modern Americans consequent upon a secular, hedonistic consumer culture that has been stripped of all spiritual significance:

Hollander traces the rise of the adversary culture to the discontents generated by modern life — most especially, secularization. The alienation of contemporary intellectuals, in his view, is a response to the frustration and emptiness created by the lack of meaning and purpose in modern, materialist society.

The postwar universities tended to reject traditional Judeo-Christian sources of meaning. But in the absence of religion, what can explain sin and guilt? The fault must reside in society.

This projection of sin onto society allows the oppositional self to find meaning. He will maintain his purity by maintaining his adversarial stance. And he will find meaning in life by crusading against America’s sins.

Thus the adversary culture is in essence an ersatz religion, a means of achieving fulfillment and expiating one's own suppressed guilt by flailing at the sins of an impersonal and nebulous "society."

Marching for social or environmental justice often serves the same function for secular man as making pilgrimages to holy shrines or crawling up the steps of the Lateran palace in Rome served for medieval believers. They gain absolution for their own assumed racism, or whatever, while demonstrating their sincerity, righteousness and moral perspicacity.

There's a lot more in Kersten's essay and it's very much worth reading.