A Weird Sort of Exceptionalism

Most of us would agree that people and organizations that believe they are better than everyone else are a real pain in the kepi.   

We also understand that this sense of being exceptional can be an essential, defining quality of success, and sometimes wild success.

The United States Marines are a good example.  The Few: that’s the only part of their long-time brand you need to know.  They’re not like you and me and that other fat slob sitting next to us. The Marines believe they are exceptional—the “first to fight,” and the finest military force in the world—and the truth is, I pretty much believe them.  In fact, you might argue that it doesn’t really matter what you or I believe; what matters is what they believe.  Knowing that they are better than anyone else inspires the Marines to do things that nobody else can or would do.

It works, this believing you are exceptional, no matter how much people hate to hear you spout off about it.

The same is true in business.  If you graduate from McDonald’s Hamburger University, you are simply the best in the world at making hamburgers.  Exceptional.  They’ll tell you that, and more than once.  In fact, there’s barely a CEO who hasn’t, at one time or another, stood in front of his company and told his team that they are leaders and the very best in the land at what they do, and that the competition simply has no chance.  General Motors felt that way for a long, long time.  General Electric, too.  IBM.  Microsoft.  Google.  Apple.  There’s something about working and rooting for organizations when they are on their “exceptional curve” (like the New England Patriots once were L) that’s inspiring as heck.

When I attended the Harvard Business School I was told (by the school) on a pretty regular basis that my classmates and I were exceptional people and destined for leadership.  This made us (you’ll excuse the term) assholes to many other people in the world--but Harvard (like the Marines and McDonald’s) apparently knew what it was doing.

We all have a visceral feel for how powerful being “exceptional” can be.  It encourages the setting of herculean goals and, from time to time, their accomplishment.

This came to mind the other day as I was reading Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, which is a collection of papers authored from a conference of historians in the mid-1990s discussing how Americans view themselves. 

As I worked through the essays, which discuss virtually every important American historian since George Bancroft, I came to understand that the consistent, relentless, obnoxious theme of American history—in fact, the only real unifying theme over 250 years--is that Americans are exceptional.  The term itself is derived from a comment Tocqueville made when he was touring the nation in 1835, that Americans are “quite exceptional,” and it stuck.

Now, if you’re not an American, you know how arrogant and obnoxious this theme can be.  In fact, it’s the basis for the “ugly American” who travels to Paris and won’t learn the money and won’t try the language and can’t find anything that’s as good to eat as the French Fries in his corner restaurant back home.

And “exceptionalism” all happened very early in our history.  By the Revolution, Americans felt they were a rising people and would sooner or later become the greatest nation in the world.  President Polk said it well: America’s history lay ahead of it.  Americans felt they had the sole and awesome responsibility of protecting and perfecting Western Civilization, of being a beacon for other nations (John Winthrop’s “city on a hill”) and an asylum for the oppressed of the Old World.

Our tools would be three: Republican government, liberal Protestantism and aggressive capitalism.

Daniel Rodgers made the point in a particularly instructive paper from Histories that being exceptional in America wasn’t just being different, but suspending the very laws of historical mechanics.  We were, as it were, above history.

Whoa.  That’s exceptional.

That's also no longer history, either, but heritage--or the invented history by which we plan and operate our lives as citizens.  No matter.  It didn't need to be true (and never does), just believed.

Never was the bandwagon rolling any faster than after World War II when American historians had to explain why their country emerged from the first 50 years of a war-torn 20^th century with a Bomb, a baby boom and a roaring economy.  When John F. Kennedy said, “We will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty,” he was saying very simply: We are exceptional.

So, you can forgive those of us in our 50s and older who have been spouting off about how wonderful America is for so long.  It’s irritating as hell, I know, but we come by our heritage honestly. 

Nevertheless, things began to unravel in the 1960s and 70s.  Historians—many of them females, who entered the trade with a vengeance in the 1970s—began to tell the American story through the eyes of women, Blacks, immigrants, and Native Americans.  This "social history" got much closer to some objective truth, but the American experience didn’t seem so triumphant or very exceptional anymore--history being the great enemy of heritage.  Soon after, historians of all stripes began writing something called "cultural history" in short, academic monographs, and American history became less a grand, sweeping saga of progress and more a largely inscrutable and fractured mess to the average American.

Of course, too, there came Vietnam, proving that Americans weren’t above the laws of historical mechanics; they weren’t even above the laws of miscalculation and stupidity.

Not so long ago America fashioned itself a beacon to the rest of the world; we had Republican government, liberal Protestanism and aggressive capitalism in our corner.  Our history was before us.  We were exceptional.

An “end of this decade” article in Time magazine in November 2009 said this:

There is no guarantee that the next decade will be any better than this one.  It’s likely China will continue to grow faster than the U.S., and we may continue to see our global dominance erode.  But very significantly, we still hold many of the world’s trump cards.  We still have the world’s strongest military. . .We are the leader in technological innovation.  And we are still the nation that most others emulate.  If we remember those points. . .then the next decade should be a helluva lot better than the last one.

Now there’s a trade: From a beacon to the rest of the world with the highest forms of government, religion and commerce on our side, and our history before us. . .to a country that “most others” emulate, with lots of guns and the Web, hoping the next decade is better than this one.

Still feeling exceptional?  I thought not.  In fact, feeling a little more like GM and a little less like Apple every day.

I don’t know exactly what it all means—other than Americans finally admitting that the food in France is ok--but I’m pretty sure of one thing, at least for Americans: There's something to be said for heritage.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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