A HEROISM TO LIVE FOR

EN: In Moral Clarity, you observe that because progressives themselves have an ironic or skeptical relationship with moral ideals, they don’t think that people on the right are truly acting from moral concerns. Can you speak about what you see as the deeper motivation of fundamentalists, both here and abroad?

SN: Both jihadists and many fundamentalist Christians are motivated by a desire that makes people want to be heroic, to transcend what is base within us, to transcend those desires determined by material things and animalistic impulses. There’s a strong human desire to transcend what is given to us, and as Immanuel Kant says, that is the only moment in which human beings know their freedom—the moment when we’re actually able to defy our material interests, even to the point of risking our lives. That’s the only moment at which we know we’re free, because normally we’re motivated and pulled by a lot of different claims on us. People often yearn to know that they’re acting in a more transcendent, absolutely free, and deeply human moment. They don’t see enough opportunities to do that in contemporary secular culture, so they turn to fundamentalist views and now, indeed, to things that go as far as suicide terrorism. Of course, that’s a devastating conclusion. But we need to develop new notions of heroism that don’t involve the idea that you actually have to die and be a tragic hero in order to express freedom. Right now, that is the model of heroism we have, and it goes back to the ancient Greeks.

EN: So you’re saying that an ideal is actually something that you want to live for, but if push comes to shove, then it is something that you would die for.

SN: Yes, but we need to get out of that mode of thinking, actually. We ought to view idealism as something you want to live for, something that you’re willing to make sacrifices for, which is harder. You have to take risks and make sacrifices—there’s no question about that. Otherwise, you’re not doing anything heroic. The model that the only true hero is a tragic hero is actually just another trick to dissuade us from ever taking any risks or doing anything heroic in the first place. If you view people as having to die tragically in order to do something heroic, it lets you off the hook, so we need to get away from that view.

But I completely understand how people would have such a view. So instead of calling jihadists cowards or fundamentalists idiots, we have to actually look at some of the facts, which are really interesting. All the empirical studies of suicide terrorism show that far from being the dregs of their societies, the people who become suicide terrorists tend to be middle class, educated, from fairly authoritarian homes, and highly idealistic.

I have not spent as much time studying fundamentalist Christians. But the other day I was watching a movie, Jesus Camp, with one of my seventeen-year-old twin daughters. My daughter was looking at these kids who were going to this evangelical summer camp and she kept saying, “Aren’t they crazy? Aren’t they crazy?” I didn’t see craziness in the least. In a couple of the characters who were being portrayed there, I saw a deep sense of commitment, of wanting to do good in the world, of wanting a sense of dignity that I would not see in a kid who is obsessed with wanting the latest iPhone.

EN: What you are pointing to as grown-up idealism, then, is just what you are describing—having a foundation of values that one would truly be willing to sacrifice for, risk for, and live for?

SN: Exactly. And I have to say that while I have been using the phrase “grown-up idealist” for a long time now, I did not think I would ever find a politician who so completely exemplified it the way Barack Obama does. He is exactly that—a grown-up idealist. He’s got his eye on reality—whether it’s using constitutional law or knowing what it’s like to be on the South Side of Chicago—but he says that that reality is not the world as it ought to be. I believe that this is what millions of Americans have been inspired by in the last year.

As somebody who grew up in the middle of the civil rights movement in Georgia, I think our having the chance to elect Obama represents the best that America can be. The civil rights movement was the last great historical event that Americans can be unequivocally proud of. We really changed the world, and we did it with comparatively little violence. There was some violence, but there wasn’t civil war, even though there might have been. The civil rights movement was an example of Americans being forced to look at the conflict between our own ideals and the reality that was America. My mother was involved in the campaign to desegregate the Atlanta public school system, so I really grew up in the thick of this. My kids don’t get it. My kids are already living in a better world than I grew up in. I tell them that in our most idealistic, most optimistic days in the 1960s, we could not have imagined being able to elect a black president in our lifetime. It is a sign that although there’s still racism and we still need to work on it, in my lifetime the world has gotten better in a really significant way.

Yet there’s still a lot of cynicism about that. The book Stuff White People Like says that white people like Barack Obama because he makes them feel good about themselves. Forget it. He makes all of us feel good, and that’s right. We’re right to feel good! You cannot make progress unless you see some examples of it, unless you believe it is possible. You can’t do anything to improve the conditions we have now unless you occasionally see some signs that things have gotten better. And forty-five years after the March on Washington, they have.