Across the Pond

by Terry Eagleton

  The aristocrat, rather similarly, justifies his august status by devoting himself to the well-being of his tenants and lackeys. He makes a point of being pleasant to his servants, whereas vulgar upstarts of stockbrokers make a point of being rude to them in order to demonstrate their superiority. Only low-bred types are snobs. The word began as a term for a shoemaker, and was then used to refer to the socially inferior. It meant not upper-class people who despise lower-class ones, but lower-class ones with a grudge against upper-class ones. Because he can do what he pleases, the aristocrat is a kind of anarchist, and thus has more affinity with the poacher than with the gamekeeper. He understands that genuine power does not need to make a display of itself, any more than real men are constantly fretting about their sperm count. True authority is so firmly entrenched that it can take itself for granted, like so many of the things the British regard as precious.

  The United States is neither a particularly comic society nor an especially tragic one. It is too affirmative to be tragic, and too much in love with heroism to be comic. When it comes to affirmation, the can-do spirit is one of the great divides between the United States and Europe. At my son’s American school, there was a poster on the wall that read “Success Comes in Cans.” In some quarters of the States, the word “can’t” seems as offensive as the word “Communist.” Success in the States also comes in CANIs, which for one American self-help writer means Constant, Never-Ending Improvement. Since there are always more goals to strive for, what he is in fact promoting is a life of perpetual dissatisfaction.

  Failure is not an option, as the typically American word “challenge” suggests. Being buried up to your neck in excrement while famished crows peck at your eyeballs is not a problem but a challenge. “Challenge” suggests that problems exist to test your mettle, and are thus to be regarded as positive rather than negative. Problems are not a problem. It is not a problem if chemical warfare breaks out in Mississippi, but a God-sent opportunity for you to “come out of it stronger.” The current British equivalent of these pious clichés is “learning lessons,” which is a coded way of admitting that you have committed some atrocious blunder. If the police have shot dead a whole class of kindergarten children under the impression that they were a gang of armed drug dealers, there are “lessons to be learnt.” The passive voice is compulsory. That you may have something to learn is the closest you can decently come to apologising in an age when nobody apologises much any more.

  Any society which calls its prisons “correctional facilities” is excessively optimistic. Prison hardly ever corrects anyone. Wherever possible in the States, you are expected to affirm. When asked how your holiday was, it is not really done to reply, “Dreadful.” My daughter once attended an American pre-school in which the teachers were trained never to speak negatively to the children. When asked how they responded to bad behaviour, they replied piously, “We don’t react.” A small boy who was punched in the face by a fellow pupil received the compliment, “Thank you, James, for not reacting.” The way to handle trouble, in other words, was to pretend that it wasn’t happening. My daughter, being of a mischievous turn of mind, instantly exploited this permissive spirit by letting off all the fire alarms. Her teacher’s response was “My, Alice sure loves to learn!” There are other ways to describe the havoc she created.

  In one sense, however, this endemic upbeatness is all to no avail. One index of national happiness ranks the United States at a paltry number 150 among the world’s nations. Americans are less likely to move upwards from their social class of origin than a whole array of other countries. Since these are discouraging statistics, they are best ignored. Brooding on them will make your hair fall out. In fact, for some Americans this is a genuine risk. Being negative generates vibes which can give you cancer, scupper your chances of financial success, and drive your spouse to commit adultery with a whole soccer team.

  Illness, however trivial and curable, is a foretaste of death, and thus a souvenir of our ultimate powerlessness. There are two ways of handling that impotence, the first of which is to repress it. Reminding people that they are frail, vulnerable creatures is not the best way of squeezing a profitable day’s work out of them, or having them confront enemy bullets in defence of the realm. The other way is the path of tragedy, which draws its power not from sidestepping human frailty but from confronting and embracing it. It does not regard suffering as positive, any more than the New Testament does. Instead, it holds that if one has the misfortune to be visited by some affliction, one must try not to disavow it but to pass all the way through it, in the hope that one might eventually emerge somewhere on the other side. One must try to let go of oneself in the faith that one might find oneself again. This is not the same as seeking out suffering in order to improve your character or enhance your virility. People who do that are not tragic but absurd.

  Cultures that can maintain a pact with failure are those than can thrive. Civilisations are to be judged by how far they honour their father and their mother. The Biblical injunction has nothing to do with the family. It had to do in its day with how one treated the old and useless of the tribe, those who were unable to labour. The United States, unlike the writings of Samuel Beckett, is not especially enamoured of pacts with failure. It is a profoundly anti-tragic nation, which has recently lived through one of the darkest episodes of its history. It is besieged by those who feel themselves to be on the sticky end of its formidable power, and who are now striking murderously back. Militarily speaking, the country is superbly well equipped to deal with these dangers. Spiritually speaking, its anti-tragic view of existence leaves it peculiarly disarmed.

  Not that the States is without its tragedies. I was once in a bookstore in the Midwest when it was proudly announced over the public address system that the author of a book entitled Barns of Indiana was present in the store, and was willing to sign copies of his book. I emerged from around a bookcase to see a small, crumpled, shy-looking man sitting at a table, pen poised hopefully in hand, beside a pile of books that seemed to stretch to the ceiling. Not a soul was within twenty yards of him, though the place was fairly crowded. After lingering in the store for another hour or so, I made my way to the entrance only to catch sight of the author still sitting at his table, visibly more crumpled in appearance, pen still poised, the pile of books still in place, and the area around him still utterly deserted. I turned my back on this poignant sight and strode quickly away. The phrase “Barns of Indiana” is still capable of waking me up at night with a guilty start. In my dreams I rewind the spool of history, return to the bookstore, stride genially up to the little man’s table and buy a dozen copies of his book. But the truth is that I shamefully backed off, and will never be able to undo this despicable act.

  There is, to be sure, a positive side to American starry-eyedness. In the end, what matters in human affairs is not optimism or pessimism but realism, and it is sometimes realistic to be hopeful. Hope is not necessarily naive, and Americans are indeed superb at problem-solving. They are resourceful, ingenious, inventive and constructive. It is just that you can be all these excellent things without suppressing the truth that all human beings finally come to utter ruin. In fact, these virtues are all the more commendable if you can practice them while staring failure candidly in the face. Otherwise one buys one’s cheerfulness on the cheap. The early American Puritans were aware that a virtue which does not wrestle with negativity is worthless.

  What one might call pathological optimism is actually a form of weakness, despite its square-jawed grin and steady gaze. It reflects a fear of confronting loss, and loss is far more central to being human than accomplishment. As such, it is just as unrealistic as the professional pessimism of so many of the British, for whom gloom is a kind of religious obligation. Americans keen on self-motivation are warned by specialists in the field who visit their companies not to read newspapers or watch TV news because of their negative content. Thinking about the slums of Mumbai might ruin their chances of a ra
ise. Because there is not much they can do about famine in Ethiopia, such events are offensive to the cult of the will. Optimism of this kind is as much a disavowal of reality as psychosis, if somewhat less spectacular. The United States has disastrously failed to exploit the power of negative thinking. It has refused to take the point of Bertolt Brecht’s dictum: “Scepticism can move mountains.”

  The British, by contrast, have no such credulous trust in the magic of the mind. They are unwavering in their assurance that problems, like sin for Evangelicals or alcohol for the AA, are phenomena in the face of which we are entirely helpless. If an American and a Briton were together in a prisoner-of-war camp, the Briton would fade gradually away with a plucky little grin and the American would escape. There are, of course, plenty of Americans who refuse the lie of the omnipotent will. If there is the general’s view of how the war is going, there is also that of the medical orderly who has to mop up the blood. Working people, for example, tend to be more realistic than their superiors, since they are closer to the ground. For those further from the facts, optimism is easy, but realism is fatiguingly hard.

  One reason why Americans are encouraged to be hopeful is that gloom is felt to be politically subversive. In this, too, the United States is a thoroughly Victorian kind of place. Victorian novels were not really allowed to end badly. The point of art was to cheer you up. Pessimism and socialism went hand in hand. Miserable people are likely to be socially disaffected. You therefore need either to get them to grin, or to deepen their misery to the point where they are too depleted and demoralised to do anything about it. People who are both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous. In general, cheerfulness is on the side of the status quo. The battle between the left and the right is among other things one between satire on the one hand, and good, clean, wholesome humour on the other. Good, clean, wholesome humorists tend to find satire nihilistic, and irritably inquire what one proposes to put in place of whatever is under fire. Bad, unclean, unwholesome humorists should resist this moral blackmail. Satire may be negative in content, but it is supremely positive in form. There is no criticism, however scabrous, that does not implicitly subscribe to an alternative vision of things.

  The belief that you can change the world by positive thinking is a kind of magic. It is the sort of faith one imagines an infant might have. Perhaps there is a touch of such magic in the cult of political correctness, for which to purge language is to purify reality. If you cannot get rid of racial inequality for real, you can always do so vicariously by changing the way you talk. This is not to suggest that speech and thought are unimportant. Europeans tend to see optimism and pessimism as ways of judging situations, whereas Americans see them as ways of creating them. If you are too despondent about your prospects, you are unlikely to succeed. People who are sour and snappish because they have no friends are unlikely to have any friends. Optimism, on the other hand, is a force which can fashion what you desire, rather like a wizard’s wand. Cheerful people are more likely to be successful than despondent ones because of the way other people treat them, though they also seem a lot more likely to end up murdered. News reports almost always describe the youthful victims of homicidal maniacs as having been zestful, bubbly, fun-loving people with hordes of friends and a great future ahead of them. Miserable people rarely get murdered.

  In this sense, both optimism and pessimism can be self-validating. For Americans, they are ways of doing something, not just ways of describing something. Not to have what you want is a problem, but it is also a sort of solution, since to feel your lack keenly enough is to be moved to get what you desire. Perhaps this is what Marx had in mind when he wrote that humankind sets itself only such problems as it can solve. Hope is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is a grain of truth in this, along with a heap of delusion. Feeling hopeful is not going to catapult a destitute drug addict into the White House, though it might help to send a rich, reformed one there. Besides, if a destitute drug addict feels good about himself, then he shouldn’t. To feel satisfied with himself is to do himself an injustice, just as he would if his life was faring magnificently but he continually put himself down. People who feel bad about themselves may be eminently rational in their self-estimation. They should not be persuaded out of it by a lot of consoling lies.

  For some Americans, feeling good about yourself is a sacred duty, like placing your hand on your heart at certain patriotic moments. “I weigh four hundred pounds, smoke four packs a day and have just taken a machete to all three of my kids, but I still feel good about myself” is the kind of declaration that might win you a spontaneous burst of applause on certain American TV shows. One of the problems with the country is that not enough people feel bad about themselves. Too many people believe in themselves on palpably insufficient evidence, rather as too many people believe in guardian angels on similarly slender grounds. For every sufferer from low self-esteem who needs cuddling, there is a megalomaniac who needs kicking. De Tocqueville thought that Americans were “in a state of perpetual self-adoration,” and had constantly to be flattered. “No [American] writer,” he comments, “no matter how famous, can escape from the obligation to sprinkle incense over his fellow citizens.” “Self-adoration” is far too strong, and Americans today can be as open to criticism as anyone else; but the cult of self-belief still strikes one as excessive. You can buy a wheeled suitcase in the States inscribed with your name and Web site in large letters, so as to market yourself while strolling through public places. Someone might always step up, impressed by your chutzpah, and invite you to become president of United Artists.

  There is, however, a price to be paid for the success ethic. A recent study showed that rich Americans tend to be more selfish and less empathetic than the poor. Compassion is for the most part a working-class virtue, not an upper-class one. Working people respond much more strongly to images of starving children that rich people do. This is gravely embarrassing for the political left. For years, they have been at pains to point out that the self-interest they deplore is a social question rather than an individual one. It is a whole class they are criticising, not this or that banker or industrialist, who can no doubt be as soft-hearted as Santa Claus. It is not personal greed that drives the system, but the need to amass profit in order to stay competitive, a need which is as impersonal as moonlight. It now turns out that this case was far too sophisticated, and that images of the wicked, top-hatted, lip-curling capitalist have much to be said for them.

  It is not true that what you feel is what you are. Donald Trump, for example, clearly feels that he is an astonishing success as a human being. In any case, this is to assume that we can always be sure of what we are feeling, which is far from true. I may have no idea what I am feeling, or imagine that I am feeling angry when in fact I am afraid. You may be able to describe my emotional state far better than I can. The belief that how you feel is how you are assumes that we are always transparent to ourselves and never self-deceived. Nobody could ever surprise me by telling me that I am thoroughly miserable. On this theory, I am in full possession of my own experience, as I am in full possession of my Bermuda shorts.

  The theory also assumes that happiness is a state of mind rather than a condition of being. A galley slave who can look forward to another forty years of rowing sixteen hours a day, while being lashed every fifteen minutes, cannot be happy even though he might think he is. To call himself happy simply goes to show that he does not know how to apply the word appropriately, perhaps because he has never been able to contrast his current situation with one of true content. Happiness for Aristotle, as for Hegel and Marx, is a matter of flourishing, which in turn is a question of how far you can freely realise your powers as enjoyable ends in themselves. You may think you are doing this, but you may be mistaken. You may not be in the right social circumstances to do so.

  The Rhetoric of Hope

  The upbeat mood of America goes hand in hand with the explicitness of its ideology. To keep the nation on its toes, you
need to keep reminding it of its dynamism and special destiny. The right to bear arms, for example, must be proclaimed from the roof tops, though some scholars now consider that this is a misreading of the American Constitution. What it actually guarantees is the right to bare arms, but a smudge on the original manuscript has obscured this fact. The British tend to see this ideological upfrontness more as a sign of anxiety than assurance. When Union flags start appearing on the streets of Northern Ireland, one can be sure that the Protestants there are feeling insecure.

  The British tend to believe that ideas work best when they have been dissolved into the bloodstream of society to the point where they become second nature. Ideally, it would no more be possible to question the institution of monarchy than it would be to question the fact that one had kneecaps. Like breathing, ideas are what give life to a civilisation, but like the lungs they are in full working order only when we are unconscious of them. It is preferable not to drag such ideas into the light of day, where they can be wrangled over and contested. Perhaps they will no longer work if we become too aware of them, as juggling does not work if you think about it too much.

  America, by contrast, tends to wear its ideology on its sleeve, which for the British is where it is least effective. Even some of its place names are ideologically charged: Hope, Zion, Providence and the like. Even “New England” is an article of faith as well as a name, meaning among other things better than the old England. Perhaps there is a town in Nevada called Market Forces, or one in Michigan called Nukecuba. The United States has not had as long as Britain to bed down its ruling ideas in everyday experience. This is one reason why it has to keep proclaiming them so loudly. It is also because some of the ideals in question are so sublime that they are hard to attain without constant exhortation.