The Worst Americans

I'm such a geeky linguist dude.

When Alexandra challenged the blogosphere to list the Worst Americans of all time, my own reaction was to meditate on what it could mean to be "the worst," a word which is certainly one of the least precise in any language. I never got around to providing my own Top Ten list, but it got me thinking of how you would go about building one; and that led to my remembering that evil is really either absent or perverted good; and from there I decided that if I were going to build a Top Ten list I would want to define the different kinds of excellence, and then look for influential people who failed significantly in those types of excellence. Thus Jimmy Carter and Billy Sunday (Prohibitionist) would both show up high on the chart of "opposite of wise," on the far end of the spectrum from, say, Benjamin Franklin.

I was particularly struck by how easy it would be to list "opposite of chaste" people and how very hard indeed it is to find a notable twentieth-century American whose defining characteristic was chastity. (Sheldon Vanauken would top my list but he's hardly famous outside of Christian circles.) There are, of course, lots of chaste people, but my point is that no American gets famous for chastity, because Americans think of chastity as a negative, rather than as a postive, virtue -- it's not something you do, but rather something you don't do. But that has to be totally wrong, for it is evil that is the absence of virtue, not the other way around. Anybody who's read and loved the Divine Comedy knows (at second hand, at least) the positive, powerful, overflowing nature of Beatrice's chastity (which is not at all the same thing as virginity); but then not many Americans read the Divine Comedy and you can count on one hand the number of American Christians out of every thousand who actually love it.

At any rate, I found Alexandra's post very highly thought-provoking, kicking off meditations on the nature of good and evil and the various classifications thereof, and bringing to my attention the need to concentrate on making sure my own teenagers (I have eight children) come to see sexual purity as something more than mere abstinence.

I doubt I'll finish the Top Ten list, but if I were going to, I think I would come up with a list of Americans I most admire, isolate the positive characteristic that best defines them, and then try to define the essence of that characteristic, and then look for the antitype. Patriotism? George Washington; antitype, Benedict Arnold. Wisdom? Benjamin Franklin; antitypes Jimmy Carter, "The-South-Is-Avenged" Boothe, Billy Sunday and the rest of the Temperance movement, and every single member of the Sixties generation that ever thought John Lennon was an intellectual and a philosopher, or who bought into "never trust anybody over thirty" or whatever the exact quote was. Humility? Abraham Lincoln and Billy Graham; antitype (beyond any question) Henry Kissinger. Love across social boundaries? Martin Luther King, Jr.; antitypes Stephen Douglas, Louis Farrakhan. The ability to write gorgeously? F. Scott Fitzgerald (who, alas, had nothing to say, but said it with the pen of an angel); antitype Joseph Smith (winner of special Lifetime Achievement version of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest). And so forth.

Note that if you're looking for failure in intellectual excellence (the effective use of God-given intelligence in pursuit of the country's welfare) then Jimmy Carter is a spectacularly bad American (it's hard to imagine a more thoroughly sinking feeling than the one I would feel if somebody were to inform me that Jimmy Carter has decided to help me out); but if you're looking for failure in moral excellence and selflessness then Jimmy's not even under consideration. It all depends on what you mean by "worst." I think that was what really got Alexandra interested in the project: any person's Worst Ten Americans list is going to tell you far more about the person who drew up the list than it will tell you about the people who made that particular cut.

Note: this post started out as a couple of comments at The Questioning Christian, who thought Alexandra's post was "mean-spirited," a response that is not I think fair to Alexandra, but does seem to resonate with Her Anchorship's recent meditations. (The Anchoress does not mention Alexandra specifically and is mostly meditating on her own attitudes.)