De Tocqueville believed that general ideas were more prevalent in America than they were in Britain, which is one reason why Americans can speak of concepts like God and freedom less shamefacedly than the British. When the English generalise, he observed tartly, it is in spite of themselves. Those who have tried to circulate cultural and political theories in England can testify to the justness of this judgement. Aristocracies, de Tocqueville considered, tend to think not in terms of general humanity but in terms of specific families, places and traditions. Democratic societies like America are more likely to think in universal terms. Certainly the modern United States has an unfortunate habit of confusing its own national interests with those of humankind in general, not to speak of those of the Creator.
SIX
The One and the Many
Uniting the Nation
The United States of America is a peculiarly self-involved society, and outside the State Department is too little aware of other nations. It is a cosmopolitan power which can sometimes display the parochial outlook of a medieval peasant. In fact, much of its acquaintance with other countries has been down the barrel of a gun. Americans say quaint things like “Bangkok, Thailand,” which nobody else in the world does, no doubt because their more untutored compatriots might imagine that Bangkok is in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Perhaps the United States invades other countries as a way of giving its citizens a much-needed geography lesson. Deciding to flatten Baghdad is a great incentive to finding out where it is.
The States also has a country too much like it directly to the north, and one too little like it directly to the south. It is true that Canadians see themselves as different from Americans, and so they are, but they are not always as different as they like to imagine.
“Americans have no neighbours,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville. This is not literally true, of course, as one who was once arrested on the Mexican-American border can testify. Even so, it is interesting to speculate on how different the United States might be if it was cheek by jowl with a nation whose culture differed sharply from its own, yet with which it felt it had equal status. France and Germany are a case in point. Perhaps then it might be less self-preoccupied and more self-critical. To see yourself from the outside, it is inadvisable to have an enormous ocean stretching on either side of you.
The only other nations which never stop brooding on themselves are small ones. They are countries too much under the heel of a more powerful state, or too recently escaped from its shadow, to be completely assured of their identities. Whereas the English talk unceasingly of the weather, the Welsh speak incessantly of Wales. This is because the English conquered the Welsh and not vice versa. Any pub table of Irish intellectuals is mathematically certain to be wrangling over Irishness. Scottishness is as much a commodity as shortbread in Edinburgh or Aberdeen. National identity becomes an issue when something has gone awry with it, just as one’s body becomes a talking point when it breaks down.
America’s self-consciousness also springs from the fact that, being such an ethnic hodge-podge, it needs to proclaim a singular identity more insistently than, say, China or Denmark. Hence the panoply of flags, emblems, slogans and insignia. No household in Ireland would fly the national flag except perhaps as a joke, or because their rugby team was about to be hammered yet again by France. Houses in Britain which fly flags tend to display not the Union Jack but the St. George’s flag, a gesture which can have racist implications. America, however, seems a country which is always about to fly centrifugally apart, fragmenting into its various social classes and ethnic subcultures, and is thus always in need of being pulled centripetally together. There is no such necessity in a minuscule place like Ireland, where the problem is not one of fragmentation but of too much homogeneity. Everyone in the country was at school with everyone else, and the grandfather of the optician across the street probably shot dead your own grandmother’s butcher during the civil war that followed upon national independence. Irish memory goes a long way back: a friend of mine in Dublin had an acquaintance who served Mass for a man who saw the invading French fleet land in Ireland in 1798.
Small nations tend to breed cronyism, corruption, mutual contempt, envy, backbiting, back-scratching, and (supposedly the besetting Irish vice) begrudgery. Their conflicts are often the upshot of being too intimate with each other, not too estranged. “Great hatred, little room,” as W. B. Yeats wrote of Ireland. America’s problem, by contrast, is to hammer some unity out of those sublime spaces and astronomical distances, a project which can be achieved after a fashion by conspiracy theories. In a nation as unimaginably large and complex as the United States, it is gratifying to feel that the whole thing is somehow intended—that it is shaped by a secret but coherent design, such as the fact that Western governments have entered into a clandestine agreement with the Arab world to undermine conservative Christian values by flooding the West with Muslim immigrants. Quite why Western governments should indulge in such pointlessly self-destructive behaviour is not immediately apparent, but the theory at least has the virtue of turning a formless mass of events into a shapely narrative. It is far more enthralling than the boring view that Muslim immigrants are just coming to the States to find work.
In conspiracy theories, as in detective stories and the paranoid mind, a sneeze is never just a sneeze but a symptom of some deeper, invisible march of events. Conspiracy theories see the world as too stuffed with meaning, and in doing so compensate for a reality which is too bereft of it. Better to glimpse a sinister purpose everywhere you look than to face the fact that nothing means anything. Human beings are ready to will anything at all, Nietzsche remarked, rather than to make do with meaninglessness. People who seem to live permanently on the grassy knoll in Dallas in order to hand out leaflets full of gobbledygook are a case in point. There are, of course, plenty of conspiracies. Lots of people gather secretly in smoke-free rooms to plot the downfall of their opponents. One should not be so sophisticated about conspiracies as to be ridiculously naive. It is just that there is no one big overall conspiracy, any more than there is one big shoe factory which supplies everybody with their footwear. There is no one big conspiracy not only because it would be hard to run, but because there is no need for it.
One way of unifying a nation is to bring it together around certain common values. The phrase “American values” is commonly heard in the United States. It includes freedom and democracy, but also tolerance, equality and a faith in progress. The only problem is that there is no such thing as American values, any more than there is such a thing as Tibetan or Tahitian values. No nation has a monopoly on decency, justice, humanity and compassion. It is true that some countries stress certain values more than others. Arabs, for example, place a high value on hospitality, while the British place a high value on cocker spaniels. For the Swiss, concealing the bank accounts of the super-rich from the eyes of tax inspectors is a particularly time-honoured custom. But freedom is not inherently American, or hospitality peculiarly Arab. What an Iranian schoolteacher wants for her children is pretty much what a Californian bank clerk wants. One should recognise cultural differences, but not make a fetish of them.
There is a sense in which the United States has been far too successful in uniting its people. The tone, rhythm, and cadence in which the waitress says “You’re all set” or “Have a good one” in Lincoln, Nebraska, are eerily identical to those you will hear in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and this in a nation for which diversity is supposed to be a supreme good. Another example of sameness is American handwriting, which is more uniform than the European variety. One can sometimes know one has received a letter from the USA before one has looked at the stamp. Styles of handwriting in Europe tend to start out roughly the same but then wildly diverge, whereas there is a way of forming one’s letters as a child which tends to stick with Americans as they grow up. Now that keyboards have supplanted script, the uniformity is complete. De Tocqueville thought that the homogeneity of America springs from the f
act that the same motive—love of money—lies at the root of everything its citizens do, and soon makes them “wearisome to contemplate.” Industry, he points out, demands regular habits and tends to breed monotony. It is, he adds perceptively, the very vehemence of America’s desire for possessions that makes it such a methodical place. It is a zeal which “agitates their minds but disciplines their lives.” This is yet another way in which the country combines restlessness and regulation.
Forms and Traditions
In Europe, traditions, conventions and social forms have traditionally played a part in forging nations into one. This is less true of the United States, a country which is restive with form and convention and has a rather cavalier attitude to tradition. Instead, innovation is what Americans are supremely good at. They rank among the most inventive, imaginative people ever to have walked the earth. The British instinct is to fit into an established mould, conform to a given model, whereas the American impulse is to break the mould and create a fresh model. Americans are natural avant-gardists.
Take, for example, the business of American names. If you want to call yourself Dongo or Duckegg, what does it matter that nobody else ever has? Why should names be confined to a few traditional, mouth-filling sounds (William, George, Mary, Charles, Elizabeth), as with the British royal family? Why not have a king called Dave or a queen called Tracey? Why not call your pet tortoise Immanuel Kant? It is a sign of a society free from the fetters of tradition that Americans can call their children anything they like. Bash, Blip, Burp, Chugger, Palsy, Bladder, Pepper, Cruddingsworth, Dimple, Aorta: all these are possibilities. If you want to give your child a sixteen-syllable name, what is there to stop you? After all, British names can be a good deal more long-winded than American ones. The marriage was recently announced in London between Sir James Lockett Charles Agnew-Somerville and Lady Lucy Katherine Fortescue Gore, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Arran. The higher you are in the British social hierarchy, the more names you tend to accumulate, as well as the more vintage cars and landed estates.
The British have the uneasy feeling that some American names are the wrong way round. They suspect that someone called Houston B. Thomas should actually be called Thomas B. Houston, but that some unfortunate error occurred at the baptismal ceremony. This is because there are not many British first names that sound like second names. One suspects that some American names are straightforward mistakes. A woman called Meave recently appeared on U.S. television. Reverse the second and third letters and you have a familiar Irish name, but otherwise it is a complete innovation. There is surely a woman somewhere in the United States called Verjinnia, just as there are probably one or two small boys called Enry running around Manchester. A couple I knew in the States were intending to give their son the Irish name Padraic. Since they pronounced it phonetically (it is actually pronounced “Porrick”), it is perhaps fortunate that they changed their minds.
For the British, tradition is a kind of labour-saving device. Like an efficient private secretary, it does a good deal of unobtrusive work on your behalf. It makes certain routine decisions about your life, thus leaving you free to devote your time and energy to something more rewarding. Tradition has decreed that the House of Windsor could not possibly call a son Vince or a daughter Gladys. This means that the royal family does not have to sit around cudgelling their brains over the question, but can get on with more important matters, such as killing harmless animals in the Scottish Highlands. You do not have to spend time fretting about whether to wear evening dress or a rabbit costume at a state banquet, since tradition has decided this for you in advance.
The great majority of men and women who have ever inhabited the planet have lived in tradition, and many of them still do. Non-traditional living is a recent invention. The collective wisdom of your ancestors was plainly a more reliable guide to how to live than any bright idea you might happen to stumble across yourself in a stray moment of inspiration. In this sense, there is a certain humility about a faith in tradition. Most of what you need to know is already available. God would not have been so outrageously inconsiderate as to fail to let us know from the outset all the truths necessary for our salvation. It is inconceivable that he might forget to tell us not to fornicate, and then belatedly plant this idea in the mind of some moralist around 1905. Innovation for the traditionalist mind is to be treated warily, and usually turns out to be bogus. Every so-called novelty is simply a minor variation on things that have existed from the origin of time. There is no idea that had not been anticipated by others. Most of our knowledge is a footnote to the ancients. There are probably proposals for Reality TV and hints on motorcycle maintenance in some lost manuscript of Aristotle. Any lecturer who declares that toothpaste was invented in the modern age is simply asking for trouble. A tube of the stuff is bound to turn up three weeks later in a Mayan temple.
Tradition, then, relieves you of some of your freedom of choice, which some Americans find objectionable. They prefer to see their lives as a series of strenuously self-defining decisions. This has some positive political implications. What is important in a liberal democracy is less what you decide than the fact that you decide. This is an admirable kind of politics, if also a somewhat adolescent one. Teenagers sometimes feel that being able to make their own decisions matters more than the decisions they make. The oddness of political democracy has not been sufficiently appreciated. It means embracing the possibility of false, even disastrous decisions simply because they are ours. We would reject the idea of an enlightened despotism even if we knew in advance that the policies it came up with would be far wiser than those we might concoct ourselves. This is extraordinary, but also perfectly proper. Human beings may misuse their freedom, but they are not truly human without it.
Americans suspect that to hand over your choices to tradition or convention is to be inauthentic. Forms are Catholic, while personal decisions are Protestant. Rites and conventions are what link people together for Europeans, and what intrude between them for Americans. A grotesque caricature of an American General in Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit cries sorrowfully, “But, oh the conventionalities of that a-mazing Europe! . . . The exclusiveness, the pride, the form, the ceremony. . . . The artificial barriers set up between man and man; the division of the human race into court cards and plain cards, of every denomination, into clubs, diamonds, spades, anything but hearts!” Form in America is at war with feeling. This is why a folksy remark in a formal setting can get you elected president. Conventions are stiff, heartless, recalcitrant affairs. They must be continually broken and remade to bring them into line with one’s changing experience. Why not call your child Blip before lunch and Cruddingsworth after dinner?
Traditions and conventions are impersonal, which for Europeans is what allows them to bring different kinds of people together. For Americans, however, they smack too little of the warm-blooded individual spirit. Individualist societies tend to find social forms unreal, even though there would be no individuals without them. Manners in America, writes de Tocqueville, “form, as it were, a thin, transparent veil through which the real feelings and personal thoughts of each man can be easily seen.” They are “hampering veils put between [Americans] and the truth.” Forms are valid only if they are directly expressive of content. Otherwise, there is something brittle and arthritic about them. America delights in the rough-diamond cop or sheriff who is driven by his humanity to throw away the rulebook and violate all the procedures. Heroes and outlaws in the States can be hard to tell apart. There is sometimes little to choose between the visionary and the vigilante.
This has its undoubted virtues. There is a European fetishism of forms about which America feels rightly uneasy. My Cambridge tutor used to refuse to shake hands with his pupils during the vacations, as this apparently contravened some arcane, medieval regulation. If we wished to consult him in his capacity as an officer of the university, rather than as a college tutor, we were obliged to leave his room and come in again. Ame
ricans would rightly consider such behaviour a form of insanity. They refuse to sacrifice feeling to form, an attitude from which Europe has much to learn.
Yet a casualness about forms can overlook the fact that rules and procedures exist to protect the vulnerable as well as shield the privileged. In Robert Bolt’s play about Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons, More’s impetuous son-in-law Roper declares that he would “cut down every law in Europe to get at the Devil himself.” “Oh?” replies More. “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast—Man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?” Roper’s attitude is Protestant, while More’s case is Catholic. More is a touch too respectful of laws and forms, while Roper sees them simply as impediments. There are a lot of hot-headed young Ropers in American movies.
As far as formality goes, the Dickens of American Notes is startled by an American who “constantly walked in and out of the room with his hat on; and stopped to converse in the same free-and-easy state; and lay down on our sofa, and pulled out his newspaper from his pocket, and read it at his ease.” Wearing a hat scarcely strikes us nowadays as free and easy, though Dickens obviously finds the act of wearing one indoors, not to speak of addressing someone else while doing so, a faintly startling example of American laid-backness. He should, he adds, be offended by such customs back home, but charitably overlooks them in the as yet embryonic nation across the Atlantic.
Across the Pond Page 14