American self-hatred

This is an addendum to my previous post in which I mentioned the idealism of the college students I used to teach. The students were seriously interested in matters like:

-- What is the meaning of life?

-- Is there a God?

-- If there is a God, why are there bad things in the world?

These are questions that philosophers have thought about for millennia. Our earliest ancestors, even before they developed reading and writing, were concerned with these questions. It is a human thing. It was once the purpose of a humanities education to thrash these issues out with our students and to help them to understand the complexities of human existence. The advent of deconstruction did away with the need. Deconstruction informed students that anything that happened before them was evil, that their ancestors were bad people. They had not wisdom to offer. After all, look at how badly they did. They saw nothing good.

Interestingly, the United States is the only country in the world where this idea took hold. Despite the crimes perpetrated by Germany in the 20th century, you will find very few Germans, of the Left or the Right, who hate their country the way that Americans do.

Why this doctrine became prevalent among American academics is perplexing. The generation that spread it was among the best educated in American history. This generation first went to school in the 1950s, where they learned the 3 Rs, how to write a legible hand, and how to sit quietly at their desks. A small number of them went to college in the mid-1960s,  just when the universities were encouraging foreign-language education. Many like myself studied a foreign language and even studied abroad. In the early 1970s we entered the professions -- and turned around and began introducing the doctrine of deconstruction into the study of literature.

The literary works that these academics taught were part of what is called the "Western" literary tradition or the "Western canon." Most of the works, however, were by European writers, not (initially anyway) American ones. It was these works in which this generation of scholars had been trained. For instance, my dissertation was on the German writer Goethe (1749-1832). Was it perhaps because of a certain felt inferiority of Americans (vis à vis Europeans) that they began to undermine the Western canon of literature?