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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

American Innocence

Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish intellectual and anti-communist dissident, writes in his 1951 book The Captive Mind: Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the […]

Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish intellectual and anti-communist dissident, writes in his 1951 book The Captive Mind:

Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the work he does in his office or factory as essential in the harmonious functioning of the world. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be, and he laughs at the idea that he might equally well be wearing a Roman toga or medieval armor. …

The man of the East [that is, behind the Iron Curtain — RD] cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any other order must be “unnatural,” and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature. But even they may one day know fire, hunger, and the sword.

The Iron Curtain fell, and Eastern Europe is free, but Milosz’s point about American innocence remains as true today as it was when Milosz wrote it over six decades ago, when Stalin was in power.

It has often been said that within America, the Southern mind is different in part because Southerners are the only region that has known war on its own soil, defeat, and the humiliation of occupation. (And just to be clear, I am glad the South lost the Civil War; we deserved to). I don’t know enough about the Civil War and its aftermath to say, but it makes intuitive sense, at least for as long as the Civil War remained alive in popular cultural memory in the South. Which it no longer does, not really.

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