A Nation of Victims
Sykes, Charles J.
because they knew who controlled the wealth of the city—but poor Irish Catholics and even poorer Jews were not so strong. Richler was tasteless enough to remind the nationalists of their...
...Rather than admit such a thing was possible the nationalists disputed the language of the survey questionnaire and noted correctly that there were even more anti-Semitic "incidents" among the "English...
...But since their nationalist pride is uncertain, their shameful past can be accommodated only by denying it ever existed...
...The keynote is "victimism," which Sykes defines as "a generalized impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self...
...The religious tradition had demanded a surrender of self among pre-modern Americans, who instinctively grasped a paradox that came to be incomprehensible to modern generations...
...Fisher's genius was to steal a march by constructing HMS Dreadnought in the remarkably short time of twelve months...
...Paul Woodward New York, New York Body by Fisher In his review of Robert K. Massie's Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (TAS, September 1992), R. J. Stove argues that "the speed and firepower of [Sir John Fisher's] ships encouraged complacency about their thin armor, with disastrous results at Jutland...
...the index is incomplete, some names are misspelled, and the notes are cluttered with secondary 72 The American Spectator December 1992 citing and garbled by misreferences...
...If Richler has ridiculed ridiculous laws, surely that is the only appropriate response of a concerned citizen in a democracy...
...In A Nation of Victims, Charles J. Sykes cuts across the ideological divide with his claim that we have become a society "unwilling to judge itself in terms of moral order...
...No one among the Quebec nationalists wanted to consider Richler's argument: that there is an intelligible connection between the bigotry of a priest or the editorial position of a major Montreal newspaper during the 1930s, and the contemporary nationalism of the French population of the province...
...What about the dreadnoughts themselves...
...A NATION OF VICTIMS: THE DECAY OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER Charles J. Sykes St...
...What does Richler say about that...
...Under its ministrations, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s degenerated into Black Power follies and de facto quotas...
...Wilson alluded to "the growing awareness" that many social troubles can be understood only "if they are seen as arising out of a defect in character formation...
...The British learned the lesson only at Jutland...
...These ships had nothing to prevent flame in a burst turret from reaching the magazines deep within the hulls...
...And, one may add, a way of excusing such revolting trends as racial preferences in the market and political correctness in the academy...
...For more than a generation now, we have been witnessing the cumulative political and social consequences of this ethos: a frantic emphasis of rights over responsibilities, a shallow reluctance to hold individuals accountable for their behavior, and "a national industry" for "the manufacture and elaboration of grievances," where the language of litigation is substituted for "the grammar of moral appeal...
...The Germans learned earlier in the war from the Dogger Bank battle that anti-flash systems were absolutely essential to battle cruiser survival...
...Nothing...
...efforts to lend a helping hand to the downtrodden evolved into self-perpetuating bureaucracies doling out mandated entitlements to slackers and outright bums...
...Having bottomed out with calculable economic appraisals of public problems, some analysts were beginning to toy with the idea that such problems (welfare dependency, crime, family disruption, poor schooling, deficit spending) owe less to defective incentives than to frayed morals...
...The battle cruisers, which, strictly speaking, were not dreadnoughts, did indeed have thin belt and turret armor...
...Richler was tasteless enough to remind the nationalists of their anti-Semitic heritage, a heritage of which they are properly ashamed...
...If it is to have a fighting chance, the kind of culture Sykes envisions will need an education system with a moral ballast heftier than the therapeutic gab sessions of today's classrooms...
...I don't expect all conservatives (libertarian or otherwise) to be as groundbreaking in their attitudes as Massachusetts Governor William Weld, but you might try to see the difference between opposing liberal nostrums and denigrating the dignity of fellow conservatives of whatever persuasion...
...Needless to say, horizons diminished quickly in such a culture, which actively discouraged transcendent reflection and reduced honest metaphysical anxiety to categories of emotional illness...
...There are shortcomings in Sykes's exposition, not least being his occasional lapses into the jargon characteristic of the therapeutic culture he castigates...
...Sykes is wise enough to be tentative about causes and effects, but it seems clear that during the prosperous years following World War II, religious faith and "the bourgeois culture of character and denial" went into decline,opening the way for what Philip Rieff has called "the triumph of the therapeutic...
...Sykes concludes by calling for "a moratorium on the politics of blame" and for the gradual creation of "a culture of character...
...No one dares admit that the French are fighting against injustices that no longer exist, nor that they are committing real injustices against their English-speaking fellow-citizens, whose bilingual sons and daughters are leaving for more hospitable places in record numbers...
...liberals get antsy about religious intrusion, conservatives about state paternalism...
...If you've been following names like Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, James Coleman, James Q. Wilson, Allen Matusow, and Shelby Steele for the past several years, you'll know that the whistle has already been blown on the culture that has produced victimism—and you won't be surprised to find those names prominent in Sykes's notes...
...Most of A Nation of Victims explores the origins and present character of American victimism, concentrating on the past half century...
...Robert C. Whitten Cupertino, California The American Spectator December 1992 73...
...Indeed, he has been criticized for having too much imagination...
...In place of restraint and self-denial, the therapeutic clerisy proposed "a culture of fulfillment whose horizons knew no limit but the appetite and ambition of the self...
...legitimate protests against the abuse of women and the mistreatment of homosexuals exploded into a cacophony of witless demands for androgynous social policies...
...They have thus described Richler as filled with delirium and hysteria, resentment, racism, bad faith, contempt, morbid introspection, unresolved personal problems, and both hatred and self-hatred...
...For all that, A Nation of Victims draws together an extremely useful compendium of insights into the American character...
...Be that as it may (and the claim seems to me overstated), Sykes offers compelling reasons to suppose that American culture is in a bad way...
...The British lost only one of these behemoths during the war, HMS Audacious, from mines off the Irish coast in late October 1914...
...Conservatives may chortle over the leftish tint of the sample entries in the foregoing catalogue, but they should notice the common denominator: what we're dealing with here is the downside of American individualism—in Sykes's phrase, "an ideology of the ego...
...Granted that rotten personal behavior does indeed create intolerable social trouble, debate centers on how to John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...It is, in Christopher Lasch's words, "the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy...
...Look, they said, Toronto has more anti-Jewish vandalism than Montreal and in 1934, in Regina, Saskatchewan, two Jewish radiologists were excluded from a hospital...
...foster good conduct, with the left and the right both discomfited by the prospect of public efforts to improve personal morals...
...Martin's Press /289 pages/$22.95 reviewed by JOHN R. DUNLAP / n its twentieth-anniversary issue (Fall 1985), the Public Interest printed an essay by James Q. Wilson on "The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy...
...Seven years later, that growing awareness has matured into what Lawrence Mead calls a new "politics of conduct...
...When the advertising copy of business resonates with the claptrap of the New Age, or when the commentary of a prominent conservative like David Gergen starts buzzing with the language of "compassion" and "root causes," we've got trouble right here in River City...
...Tyrrell really can do better than this) and acclaim as "superb" Pat Buchanan's call for religious and cultural war, you perpetuate the myopic bigotry that has for long tarred the right...
...In his 1985 essay, Wilson averred that the public interest is legitimately served when schools induce the very young, by good example as well as by precept, to act "virtuously"—that is, "with due restraint on one's impulses, due regard for the rights of others, and reasonable concern for distant consequences...
...Worst of all, no one even knows how to talk about the relationship of bigoted priests in the 1930s to bigoted intellectuals today...
...T he motto of victimism is "I DESERVE," and its national anthem is the Whine...
...Such bile might well alert ordinary readers to the existence of a real issue...
...t71 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 10) think Mr...
...honest movements to reform the legal system energized a generation of litigious buffoons with sophomoric excuses for the most vicious criminal behavior...
...As for Fisher, I have never before seen him referred to as unimaginative...
...The idea of the all–big gun battleship had been in the air for several years...
...What kind of trouble...
...The statement is only partially true...
...In the therapeutic ethos, "compassion" became the chief Value, understood "not as a sacred duty owed to God or man but as a way of refining one's sense of self-identity and self-awareness...
...Americans seeking a quick study of the painful recent history of their northern neighbor cannot do better than this splendid piece by Canada's best writer...
...Nor should A Nation of Victims take any awards for exact editing and scholarly depth...
...The therapeutic culture, with its array of "helping professionals," rose in hostility to the religious impulse and asserted a "right to be happy...
...prudent concerns about industrial pollution were overtaken by the green bandwagon of tree-hugging fruitcakes and spongy opportunists...
...One nationalist Member of Parliament urged that the book be banned under Section 319 of the Criminal Code as hate propaganda...
...The essay pointed to a hesitant change in the assumptions of policy analysts...
...Richler cited public opinion surveys that indicated contemporary French Quebec was more anti-Jewish in its attitudes than English-speaking Canada...
...However, the blowing up of HMS Queen Mary, Indefatigable, and Invincible and the near-destruction of HMS Lion resulted as much from carelessness about ammunition handling to attain a higher rate of fire as from thin armor...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
