My several articles on national character, with more in the works, explore several aspects of this elusive topic. Here are some notable statements on the subject, in chronological order:
Joe Biden, on the occasion of National Caribbean-American Heritage Month: "We honor the generations of Caribbean Americans who have built our Nation, shaped our progress, and strengthened our national character." (May 31, 2022)
Ian Buruma makes the case against applying national character analysis to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. He takes as his proof text an article in the Times Literary Supplement by the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko who interprets this event through the prism of "Dostoevskyism," meaning "an explosion of pure, distilled evil and long suppressed hatred and envy." Buruma compares this to the American analyses of the World War II period (which I looked at in detail at "The Great Inquiry into National Character").
Rather, like me, he points to historical forces:
Highly civilized people can turn into barbarians when demagogues and dictators exploit their fears and trigger their most atavistic instincts. Rape, torture, and massacres often happen when soldiers invade foreign countries. Commanding officers sometimes actively encourage such behavior to terrorize an enemy into submission. And sometimes it occurs when the officer corps loses control and discipline breaks down.
Buruma makes the important point that ahistorical cultural analysis supports Putin's goals:
To see the Ukraine war as a conflict not only with Putin's regime but also with Russian culture, and to treat all Russians as existential enemies, is a great gift to the Kremlin. It strengthens the persecution complex Putin needs to keep the Russian people on his side. Moreover, it fosters the kind of attitudes that the Allies mistook in postwar Germany and Japan for the markers of an essential and immutable national character. We must avoid making that mistake again.
(June 7, 2022)
The White House issued "A Proclamation on Bill Of Rights Day, 2022" that asserts the Bill of Rights "lives in our national character." (December 14, 2022)
Matthew Oey, an undergraduate at Columbia University, published "The Anthropologists' War: Orientalism, Pragmatism, and Mythology in American cross-cultural studies on Japan during World War Two." The windy title hides a study in the Edward Said mode of national character studies. The author argues three points: first, it's
these cultural studies must be understood within the context of an infrastructure of knowledge production that privileged pragmatic and "Orientalist" studies that reinforced the racially-essentializing zeitgeist; second, that the military's enlistment of anthropology was not merely passive, but actively shaped the discipline; third, that anthropologists had little control over how their ideas were understood and circulated, and were thus not central determinants behind public perception and military policy but were primarily used as ex post facto justification.
(May 17, 2024)
