Given its religious and political history, belief in the States plays a more prominent public role than it usually does in advanced capitalist nations. Many such nations believe as little as they can decently get away with. Doctrines are regarded as a hangover from earlier times. It is not belief that holds Finland or South Korea together. It is not what holds the United States together either, but for historical reasons it is mightily more important there. Given this centrality, beliefs are more easily pressed to an extreme. Such extremism is apparent even in fairly trifling matters. Rather than just objecting to other people smoking, some Americans feel compelled to knock their cigarettes violently out of their hands. People do not just rise early, they rise ludicrously, eye-wateringly early.
Excessive zeal also applies to homeland security. Whenever you visit the States these days, you require a new photograph of yourself if the last one you submitted was taken over six months previously. It is just possible that one’s hair might have grown down to one’s knees in that period, or that one’s nose might have mysteriously morphed from bulbous to aquiline. Perhaps American eyes change colour more often than they do in the rest of the world. On submitting a new photo of myself to the U.S. Embassy in Dublin, I once ventured to joke that my fingerprints, too, might have altered out of all recognition over the previous six months, and that they might wish to take them again. They did not seem to find this amusing. On the contrary, they wrote a small note on my file, which was already alarmingly thick. In American airports, one’s boarding pass seems to be checked every three or four minutes, as though one’s identity might have altered in the process of walking from security to the departure gate.
Law and the Irish
The American cult of prohibition would not go down well in Ireland, a nation where there are plenty of laws but where citizens exercise a degree of individual judgement about which ones to obey. Plainly ridiculous prohibitions, such as not spitting on the sidewalk or not racing your bicycle at high speed through a crowded shopping mall, will simply be ignored. Irish attitudes to the law are shaped by the fact that for many centuries, the justice system in the country was not their own but a colonial imposition. This is an excellent excuse for parking your car in someone’s front garden. People who shoplift iPods are really victims of colonial oppression. They might even get round to using this defence in court.
The Irish are a Catholic nation, not a Puritan one. They can be sternly repressive about sex, but much of this dates from the Great Famine, when questions of fertility control, population growth, celibacy, emigration, the division of the land and the like began to bulk large. For the most part, the Irish are not an easily shockable people. One can make outrageous remarks about sex, though not necessarily demeaning comments about the Virgin Mary. In some parts of Protestant Britain, the opposite is true. Morally speaking, they are a remarkably tolerant people. On the whole, the Irish are a moral nation (very few of them get murdered, for example), but not, like a lot of Americans, moralistic. The vigilante spirit is largely foreign to the country, though the Irish have shown themselves well capable of racism in recent times. Even so, it would never occur to them to form a posse to drive prostitutes (as opposed to drug dealers) out of town.
The Irish have also been wary of the Protestant work ethic, which is not a fancy way of suggesting that they are bone idle. This, too, can mark them out from the work-hungry Americans. Irish labourers sweated blood to build the roads and canals of Britain, a country that had helped to despatch many thousands of their compatriots to their graves in the Famine years. Yet they managed for the most part to keep work in proper perspective, and knew that enjoying yourself is morally speaking a good deal more important. Planting potatoes, the traditional economic activity of the Irish, leaves you with a fair amount of leisure, as potatoes generally look after themselves. The Irish thus had time for their feast days and holidays, and devoted large amounts of energy to socialising, as well as to creeping out at night to take pot shots at landlords to whom they might deliver solemn pledges of loyalty during the day.
Nor are the Irish earnest and high-minded. On the contrary, they can be witty, irreverent, satirical and iconoclastic, which is not on the whole true of the inhabitants of Holland, Michigan, or Provo, Utah. They are also deeply unsentimental and have a keen sense of the ridiculous, which is also not generally the case in Holland or Provo. Drinking, dancing, cursing and gambling are not only tolerated in Ireland but sometimes compulsory. Religion there is not notably at odds with gratification. It is true that there have been plenty of Irish kill-joys. A nineteenth-century bishop once remarked that Irish dancing was morally speaking the best kind of dancing there was. He meant that there could be no groping, since Irish dancing involves holding your arms by your sides. He also meant that it is so exhausting that it leaves little energy for any more dubious acts of pleasure. Even so, English visitors to Ireland in the eighteenth century could be scandalised by the free sexual talk of the young women, which did not of course imply that they were sexually free in reality.
Intolerance and Public Spirit
Religious civilisations are often thought to be intolerant ones. When it comes to the United States, the answer to the question of whether it is a tolerant or intolerant nation is a decisive yes. Purple-faced bigots are allowed to gather on street corners to bawl their hatred of those with views different from their own. This is an excellent thing. And an appalling one too, of course. In some ways, the country is magnificent about allowing people to do their own thing. In other ways, its visceral resistance to anything that differs from it is legendary. A recent poll revealed that one in five Alabamians and more than one in four Mississippians believe interracial marriage should be illegal. Americans are allowed to go to all kinds of eccentric lengths to make money, but are expected on the whole to conform to small-town mores in the process. Flamboyance is acceptable, but not outright aberration. De Tocqueville thought America had less freedom of discussion and independence of mind than any other nation. Freedom of spirit, he writes, is unknown there. Since freedom of spirit is exactly what the United States prides itself on, this is rather like complaining that the Italians can’t sing and the French have nothing worth eating. De Tocqueville’s complaint is certainly not true of the United States today, where there is an impressive amount of spiritual free enterprise.
The tyranny of public opinion is what most disturbed this European observer about the country. You were not exactly coerced, but you were not exactly free either. The irony of democracy for de Tocqueville is that it substitutes the voice of the people for political despotism, but that voice can be as stifling and oppressive as a Sultan’s. It is thus that political freedom gives birth to its opposite. You can believe what you like, he remarks, but if it fails to chime with the opinions of your neighbours, they will treat you as a pariah. Nobody, he adds, is prevented from writing licentious books, but nobody would think of doing so either.
Writing licentious books aside, there is still something of this moral climate in the States today. It is never entirely safe to demonstrate in the name of a deeply unpopular cause on the streets of Britain, but it is probably safer than doing so in many an American town. All the same, de Tocqueville’s remarks grossly underestimate the range and diversity of American freedoms. It is true that you can allow people all the liberty you like once you know that they have internalised all the proper restraints. But the United States, like Europe, remains a place where you cannot be carted off to prison for declaring your allegiance to Rosa Luxemburg. This is not a freedom to be underrated. There are those elsewhere in the world who have given their lives to attain it. The only problem is that it is shrinking all the time, as state surveillance and the spectre of Islamism loom larger.
Religion in America goes hand in hand with a strong civic spirit. It is a more Victorian society than Britain in several ways, not least in its cult of philanthropy. Most British students would not care to depend for their labs and dorms on the charitable whims of millionaire
businessmen in pursuit of tax breaks. They would want this no more than they would wish to see Prince Charles handing out food parcels to the deserving poor in Trafalgar Square. They regard education as a right, not a privilege. In fact, most British students would like to see college education free of charge, funded perhaps by the tens of billions of pounds lost to the country each year in tax evasion.
Even so, the mighty lineage of American philanthropy reflects the nation’s civic conscience, which is a great deal more vigorous than it is across the Atlantic. Public-spiritedness is a resplendent American virtue. In his American Notes, Charles Dickens reserves some of his most rhapsodic prose for the civic life of Boston. “Above all,” he writes in florid vein, “I sincerely believe that the public institutions and charities of this capital of Massachusetts are as nearly perfect, as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity, can make them. I never in my life was more affected by the contemplation of happiness, under circumstances of privation and bereavement, than in my visits to these establishments.” He is speaking of such places as the Boston asylum for the blind and hospital for the insane, and is rather keener on these institutions than he is on the Washington Senate. The Senate is, he allows, “a dignified and decorous body,” but one whose dignity is somewhat tarnished by the state to which the carpets have been reduced “by the universal disregard of the spittoon.” He also notes the curiously swollen faces of some of its members, “caused by the quantity of tobacco they contrive to stow within the hollow of the cheek.” U.S. senators who were caught stashing tobacco in their cheeks today would probably be forced to spend the rest of their lives hiding out in the Nevada desert. It might be better for them to be caught illicitly consorting with a donkey.
Anarchy, Law, and Eccentricity
Puritan cultures can be both repressive and individualist. No doubt this is one reason why the United States is such an odd combination of anarchy and authoritarianism. This is not as surprising a mixture as it may seem. If everybody is allowed to do their own thing, you need a particularly stout framework of order with which to contain this potential chaos. Things are rather different in the United Kingdom. The British are a largely law-abiding bunch, but they also have a streak of libertarianism. So do Americans—but whereas in the States this tends to be an ideological affair, complete with high-pitched rhetoric about the dangers of state control, it is a less political matter in Britain. The British dislike authority not because they are opposed to the state on principle, but because they want to be left alone to breed pigeons or attend classes in flower arranging. They do not want to be free of regulation so that they can aspire, rise through the ranks or accumulate profit, but so that they can potter about as they please. They are not so much individualist as idiosyncratic. Their resentment of those in charge is less politically militant than passive-aggressive. It is part of the “free-born Englishman” syndrome, which is less strident and self-conscious than the “free American” complex.
The British want to be allowed to pursue their own quirky way of life with as little interference from others as possible. This differs from American libertarianism, with its fear that a sinisterly autocratic state will rob citizens of their initiative and autonomy. On this view, the British National Health Service is a place where you describe your medical symptoms to a robot cunningly disguised as a physician, which then relays them to an underground bunker in Whitehall where a computer the size of an aircraft carrier decides whether you should be treated or painlessly put down. Cancer patients might find that the funds for their treatment are suddenly withdrawn in order to fund the repair of potholes on the M6 motorway.
It is not the state that the British object to, but other people. Not long ago, the most popular sport in the United Kingdom was not soccer but fishing. Fishing is a fine excuse for avoiding other people. The same is true of the collegiate system at Oxford and Cambridge. Because everyday life in these universities is organised on a collegiate rather than departmental basis, you do not have to encounter other people in your own academic subject from one year’s end to another. This is one of the great advantages of having a job in these places, and ought to be emphasised in their advertising. Since the person sitting next to you at college lunch is likely to be in a subject you have never heard of, let alone know anything about, there is no tedious necessity to talk to them. This greatly enhances the quality of intellectual life, as with those marriages in which one partner lives in San Diego and the other in Hong Kong. The durability of such relationships tends to restore one’s faith in wedlock.
Over the centuries, the British have perfected all kinds of ingenious methods for avoiding each other. Americans, by contrast, are a gregarious crowd, endlessly clubbable. The country is stuffed with guilds, fraternities, sororities, learned societies and professional associations, along with conferences, seminars, conventions, summer institutes and other such anthropological rituals, all of which are taken with immense seriousness. One of the largest of such bashes is the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, where it is possible to be in hotels with thousands of other people all of whom could tell you the name of Hamlet’s mother. People in Britain attend such gatherings less frequently and eagerly, and do so largely in order to drink. They are shy creatures, not easily taken into captivity. Life is so arranged as to avoid as far as possible those unfortunate collisions known as meeting other people.
The British, then, are out to protect their divine right to be eccentric, not to voice some aggressively libertarian doctrine. They are quite willing to accept authority provided it does not disrupt their way of life. When it does, they become bloody-minded, which is not a word generally familiar to Americans. To be bloody-minded means not to throw up barricades in the streets but to be doggedly, persistently, perversely non-cooperative. The British have a special affection for people who are cussed, cross-grained and curmudgeonly. It is an echo of their Nonconformist past. The icon of British liberty is the citizen who causes a motorway to be re-routed because he will not give up his one-acre vegetable patch. This, not someone who jumps off a bridge to save a drowning child, is the British definition of a hero. The other kind of hero in Britain is someone who jumps off a bridge to save a drowning dog.
The well-regulated nature of American life goes hand in hand with its moralistic outlook. Compared with the Irish, Americans are by and large a judgemental people. There is a good deal of sermonising and sententiousness. A certain self-righteousness is never far from the American soul. So-called interventions are not unknown, in which the whole of one’s extended family, along with several busloads of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and random strangers along for the ride, break down your front door and spill into your living room to warn you of the perils of smoking the occasional after-dinner cigar.
This would never happen in Britain. Instead, the British would allow you to die in the gutter, pustular and emaciated, for fear of interfering with your privacy. They would let you perish friendless and unaided for roughly the same reasons they would not dream of speaking to you in a railway compartment. It is not that they are hard-hearted, just that they believe in minding their own business. Their ethic of live-and-let-live can escalate to lethal extremes. They go to extraordinary efforts to pretend that other people are not there, like men and women under hypnosis whose fingernails are being pulled out by a pair of pliers but who do not react because they have been told that they are alone.
FIVE
The Affirmative Spirit
Comedy and Compromise
The story is told in Ireland of a fiddlers’ competition out in the west, the winner of which would become All-Ireland champion. (The title “All-Ireland champion” is admittedly rather loose: one tends to bump into scores of All-Irish champion musicians up and down the country, as though every second woman on the street in the United States were to turn out to be Miss America.) The first contender for the award stepped on to the stage: a suave, distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman in evening d
ress, exquisitely coifed and bearing in his hand a genuine Stradivarius. Resting the instrument against his chin with a well-practised flourish, he drew the bow vigorously across the strings and began to play.
And by God he was useless.
The second candidate for stardom then turned to face the audience—a slick-haired, flashy-toothed type in a well-tailored grey suit, carrying in his hand an expensive but not classic violin. With an ingratiating smile, he placed the instrument under his chin and began to play.
And by God he was useless.
The judges were just on the point of declaring a no-winner when there was a slight commotion at the back of the room. Despite his evident reluctance, a third competitor was being forced to the front by his friends—a tiny, shrunken, octogenarian fellow in a crumpled old suit buttoned up with bits of string and hardly a seat to his trousers. In his withered claw lay a fiddle as decrepit as himself, its strings frayed and peeling, its wood leashed together by elastic bands. Shrinking from the crowd, but urged on loyally by his friends, he placed the fiddle beneath his chin with a quivering hand and softly drew the tattered bow across it.
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