Ain't That America?

The American Idea, part 3

The American Idea (1) is a fluke, (2) includes some values worth keeping and building on, and (3) is in mortal peril.

Running through the American identity has been a certain historical account defining what being an American meant. It’s the story that ran along lines typified by Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization – 11 volumes published over 40 years (1935-1975). The Durants,

"basically told human history (mostly Western history) as an accumulation of great ideas and innovations, from the Egyptians, through Athens, Magna Carta, the Age of Faith, the Renaissance and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The series was phenomenally successful, selling over two million copies." (David Brooks)

As Americans, we were the inheritors of these great ideas, the descendants of the Europeans who devised them. The Durants never said, "white people are genetically superior," or "are God's favorite." Neither did they provide any other explanation for why these "great ideas and innovations" did not appear in the pre-Colombian Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, or East Asia. Absent an alternative explanation, readers were left with an impression that there must be something special about people of European descent. What else could account for European dominance? Without ever saying it explicitly, narratives of which the Durants' Story of Civilization is typical facilitated a self-justifying loop: we are dominant because we’re superior, and the proof that we’re superior is that we dominate.

It took awhile, but cultural anthropologists gradually worked out the specifics of an alternative explanation. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel came out in 1997, and helped popularize and spread what cultural anthropologists had been learning. Diamond told a story of the rise of European wealth and power as rooted in geography. From the fertile crescent westward, temperate climates, suitable soil, and an unusual availability of domesticable animals created the conditions that freed a little time for technological development and that gave rise to population centers where proximity of humans to each other and their domesticated animals led to diseases and eventual immunities not found among other humans. The technology (steel, guns) and the immunity (germs) were the key means by which Europeans came to dominate the globe.

Diamond helped many of us with the concrete details of how it could be that Europeans became so dominant even though Europeans are neither smarter or more virtuous by nature – nor more violent, vicious, and dominating by nature -- than other peoples. Europeans are just the products a particular geography along with some random flukes – and that geography gave us a bit more wealth, a bit more opportunity to play around with ideas for new technology. In the process we had bigger population centers, more disease, and eventually immunities.

It’s a fluke that Europeans ended up with guns, germs, and steel – but once they had them, they had the power to overrun much of the world.

I do believe, though, that some of those "Great Western Ideas," really are great. Particular favorites of mine include liberal democracy (free elections; a free press; an independent judiciary) and the modern scientific method, both of which began taking shape among Europeans in the mid-seventeenth-century.

Can we be vigorous in defense of liberal democracy and science while acknowledging that these Great Ideas appeared where they did because of a geographic fluke rather than the beneficent smile of divine providence upon people with paler skin? Can we hope to address Western civilization's problems -- ameliorate the evils it has perpetrated and reduce oppression and exploitation -- by advancing, rather than retreating from, norms of truth and justice?

Instead, we are seeing retreat from democratic norms and scientific standards of assessing truth. Turning around will require renewed commitment to those ideals – even as we accept that our ideals are contingent accidents of history. When it comes to the United States of America – the land and the people that made me -- I am equal parts misty romantic and indignant critic.

The Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on 1776 July 4, declared the signers' intent to “institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” Those were radical principles. The Declaration said: “All...are created equal,…endowed...with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness….To secure these rights, governments are instituted..., deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

These inspiring principles are my core aspiration for my country, and the ground of my criticism of it. The shame and pride go together.

I came of age during the Vietnam War, when there was good cause for being ashamed of my country. At the same time, I was proud of my friends and mentors (most of whom I knew through my Unitarian Universalist church) who marched and demonstrated to end that war. I'm ashamed of our consumptive greed -- of the rapacity of one-twentieth of the world's population consuming one-fourth the world’s resources. Yet I’m proud to inherit the tradition of environmental consciousness of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Duane Elgin, Bill McKibben, Joanna Macy -- writers whose turn of mind could not have come from Europe, or Asia, or South America, or even Canada.

I'm proud of our independent judiciary, as secured by Marbury v. Madison (1803), our finest innovation of government, and grievously ashamed that this judiciary's highest court could have produced the Bush v. Gore decision. There have been other horrible decisions -- Dred Scott (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Lochner v. New York (1905), Buck v Bell (1927), Korematsu v. US (1944), and Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), among the worst -- but none so baldly devoid of jurisprudential principle and so nakedly in service of a partisan outcome. On the bleak day in December 2000 when William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas opted to erase the line between interpreting the law and preferring a candidate in an election, I felt a key part of the American Idea die.

I'm proud of our Statue of Liberty, with its open-armed invitation of welcome, and ashamed that so many of my fellow country-men and -women, with willful and passionate ignorance, so approve of revoking that very invitation.

All that. And more. We have a capacity for awe and wonder that is the equal of our arrogance and belligerence. Our inquisitiveness is not less than our acquisitiveness. "American spunky can-do spirit" is not a lie. Neither is our history of terrible theft, injustice, and oppression.

There is a land before us now -- as there has been for 400 years -- with possibilities for realization of rights, freedoms, and opportunity, shared universally and equally, at a level the world has not seen before. It is, as Langston Hughes said, "The land that never has been yet— /And yet must be." Come, and go with me to that land.



* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "The American Idea"
See also: Part 1: American Contradictions
See next: Part 2: Who Are My People?

Who Are My People?

The American Idea, part 2

From Paul Simon's "American Tune":

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hour
and sing an American tune

When I heard that as a teenager, it didn’t occur to me to ask, “What ‘we’?” A lot of us who now share this land didn’t come on the Mayflower, and none of our ancestors did. For African Americans, of course, many if not most of their ancestors who weren’t born in the New World but who died here were brought here on slave ships. Others of us here today have ancestry among those who were here thousands of years before the Mayflower. And millions more have ancestry among people born in Asia, or in Latin America.

And then there are some who are all of the above. Ancestry is a more complicated thing than we usually acknowledge. Figuring 25 years per generation as an average – 10 generations back will get you to 1768. Ten generations back, you had 1,024 8th-great grandparents. Who were those 1,024 people? Some of us have some 8th-great grandparents who were born in Europe, others were born in Asia, others were native peoples of North or Central or South America, and others were African-descent slaves. I have no idea how many people have ancestry in all of these camps, and its hard to know because we tend to be focused on whatever the most dominant identity is. Which is to say: we have been pushed into one box or another.

None of my ancestors came on the Mayflower, I don't think. Where did my ancestors come from? A couple months ago I did a few of those DNA ancestry tests. I spit into the little tube they send you, and mailed in my saliva and 3 or 4 weeks later got the results. I was hoping for something interesting, but, alas, I am, in fact, as plain boring whitebread genetically as the identity I was raised with. English-Welsh – that would be mostly my father’s side – and Swiss-German – that would be mostly my mother’s side. The only mild surprise was that I have a fair chunk from Scandinavia. Oh, great. I'm from even farther north Northern Europe than I knew. Not that it matters. If I had some surprising level of Native American or African genes, it would do nothing to change the fact I look the way I look and was raised in this country taking for granted the privileges afforded to people who look this way.

Even if none of my ancestors were literally on the Mayflower, and even if I think it would be "cool" to have a different heritage than I do, I have to own that those were “my people” coming on that boat. What exactly “my people” means is an ongoing question, but in some sense I inherit a certain kind of responsibility -- a certain karma -- as a cultural, if not genetic, descendant of those who came "on a ship they called the Mayflower." In some broad sense, I came on that ship.

And as a teenager listening to Paul Simon, it didn’t occur to me how many people that song lyric excluded. That’s something that’s changed. My consciousness has been raised in recent years – as has many peoples’. America includes a lot of "we" who, even in a broad sense, did not come on the Mayflower.

The song ends with an affirmation. Despite everything, “it's all right, it's all right. You can't be forever blessed.” So get some rest, cause there’s more work yet to be done. And, yes, the American Idea indeed requires more work if it's going to be revived as an idea -- if it's going to be realized.

The U.S. today is a system decreed by the powerful – the colonizers and the descendants of those colonizers – the people who identified themselves as white and trained to recognize whiteness at a glance wherever possible. The original European colonizers were dominated by two groups. There were the religious seekers. What I learned in school was that they came here seeking religious liberty. And it’s true that many of them had been persecuted in Europe. They came here not to escape from orthodoxy, but to have a place to enforce their own.

The other group were the ones who were deported here. England used its holdings in the New World as a sort of penal colony. People with debts they couldn’t pay or convicted of various crimes were deemed unacceptable to British society, so they were packed off to America.

The dialog that defined what America would be largely excluded the Native Peoples, and the African slaves. The two groups “at the table,” as it were, for that dialog were the zealots and the hoodlums. What a weird idea this place is!

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "The American Idea"
See also: Part 1: American Contradictions
See next: Part 3: Ain't That America?

American Contradictions

The American Idea, part 1

Our spiritual quest encounters the universal and the particular. What are we? We are a mix of universal and particular – a mix of what is cultural and the transcendent: what we have learned, how we’ve been socialized, and what is true of us just by virtue of being human, or by virtue of being mammal, or by virtue of being vertebrate.

What are we? I’d like to call us American – I beg your indulgence to allow that. Some of us may not have been born in the US. Some of us may not be US citizens. In calling us American, I just mean that we now live reside within the borders of the US. Even if we’ve been here only a short time, we’ve been influenced by this place – as one cannot help but be influenced by wherever one resides.

But what is this influence? What does it mean to be American? How does answering that question contribute to answering the spiritual question: who am I? what am I?

An article by columnist Yoni Appelbaum looks at "The American Idea" -- and its status lately. He says, in essence (adapted, abridged, and paraphrased):

“The American Idea” asserts that universal and equal rights, freedoms, and opportunity is both a good idea – indeed, a moral imperative – and an American idea – that is, the U.S. bears a special responsibility to model a civic culture that embodies rights, equality, and democracy in a way the world had not seen before. Americans have been held together by the conviction that the United States had a unique mission, even as they debated how to pursue it. From the first, the American Idea provoked skepticism. How could people be allowed to define their own destinies without the stabilizing power of an aristocratic class? It bordered on absurd to believe that a nation so sprawling and heterogeneous could be governed as a democratic republic. The experiment seemed doomed from the beginning. When, after the 1860 election, 11 states seceded, the anticipated collapse appeared to have happened. Yet we persisted.

Americans have never agreed on when to prioritize the needs of individuals and when their collective project should come first. Today, however, we’ve lost the sense that there is any collective project.

In part, the American Idea is a victim of its own success: Its spread to other nations has left America less distinctive than it once was. But it is also a victim of its failures. Recent reports rank the U.S. 32nd in income equality. Its rates of intergenerational economic mobility are among the lowest in the developed world. The U.S. ranks in the lower half of nations in new-business formation and percentage of jobs new businesses account for. Today, Americans describe China as Europeans once described the United States—as an uncouth land of opportunity and rising economic might.

Both left and right are pulling "American" apart from "Idea." The left defends principles no longer identified as American; the right defends an America no longer identified with principles. Thus, even as the left is made queasy by the notion that an idea can be both good and distinctively American, the right doubts that America is defined by a distinctive idea at all. It promotes, instead, a generic nationalism — one defined, like any nation’s, by culture, borders, interests, and enemies. Under attack on both flanks, and weakened by its failure to deliver exceptional results, the nation’s shared identity is crumbling. (original article HERE)

I was a teenager when I first heard Paul Simon’s song, “American Tune.”



I resonated with the bluesy aspects: I've been mistaken, confused -- felt forsaken, felt far away from home. And then the song carried me outside my self to recognize, even in the midst of whatever I’m down about, a kinship with others. Everyone’s been battered. No one feels at ease. Every dream has been shattered or driven to its knees. Some of them, maybe, can be rebuilt, but their final form is never their original form.

So we are left wondering: what went wrong. We can’t help it, we wonder what went wrong. And all this seems somehow a very American state of affairs.

I couldn’t have articulated it as a teenager, but I felt my country's contradictions. To some extent these contradictions are built into the human species, but the colonizers of the land that would become the United States brought a certain particular heightening of those contradictions. As Andrew Sullivan writes, in a book review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths:

“reason and faith, truth and propaganda, black and white, slave and free, immigrant and native, industry and agriculture — ripple through this history, with one obvious period where the country simply came apart in the bloodiest civil conflict in history. No country before or since has been this convulsed with conflict and wealth. No country has been both a republic and effectively an empire across an entire continent. No country had ever been defined as one of strangers and travelers, where waves and waves of immigration constantly churned through society. No people were as passionate both for slavery and for freedom.” (HERE)

No wonder it’s sometimes hard to be bright and bon vivant. No wonder we sense that somehow things have gone wrong.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "The American Idea"
See next: Part 2: Who Are My People?
Part 3: Ain't That America?