Across the Pond (15 page)

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 raise. 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.

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 fact 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.