Across the Pond (16 page)

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. Americans 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.

Formality can indeed be constrictive, but America’s distaste for it means that dignity is not what it does best. Three young women who appeared on U.S. television recently to plead for the arrest of their brother’s killer seemed like any other young people in the world assigned such a mournful task, except that all three of them were chewing gum. Allusions to slam dunks and home runs are ritually inserted into serious political commentary. Sporting metaphors infiltrate official language far more than they do in Europe. When George W. Bush spoke on television, it did not seem out of the question that he might suddenly pull a toy fire engine out of his pocket and run it up and down his sleeve while making
brrmm-brrmm
noises. A lack of gravitas is the price Americans pay for their attractive ease of manner. If Barack Obama is an untypical American, it is not because he is a closet socialist or was born on Venus, but because he is able to be relaxed and dignified at the same time.

Soft Cosmos

Forms and traditions, then, cannot be relied upon to unite the nation. They constrain personal choice, and constraint in the United States, except when it comes to locking up child pickpockets for three consecutive life terms, is in general frowned on. It is part of the affirmative spirit of the nation that there are few given restrictions in human life. Some restraints, regrettably, are essential, but for the most part they are limits we impose on ourselves, and thus testify ironically to our freedom. If I handcuff my wrists, lock myself in a sack and hang myself upside down from the ceiling for a year or so, my liberty is not fundamentally affected. After all, I did it all myself.

To the medieval mind, the only truly unconstrained being was God. Yet if God’s freedom was to be perfect, it could not be confined by the world he had created. If it was, he would not be all-powerful. He would be as much constrained as we are by the fact that blood coagulates, or that you can hire a horse and carriage in Luxor. Some medieval thinkers therefore taught that God was no respecter of the logic of his own Creation. Because he made the world, he could do what he liked with it. It was his private property, and he could annihilate it tomorrow, or turn it into an enormous Barbie doll, just as you are free to rip your priceless Rubens to pieces if the fancy takes you. It was this way of seeing, one which made much of the supremacy of God’s will, that was to win out in the modern period. After a while, the divine will was replaced by the human one. The world was now our private property, to be disposed of as we wished.

On this view, there is no necessity to the way things are. If there were, then God would be subject to the laws of his own universe. In fact, however, he suffers no such indignity. If he grows bored with fire being hot, the royal family being cold, or Clint Eastwood being right-wing, he can always take these things back to the laboratory and redesign them. There is nothing necessary about fire being hot. In another of God’s universes it might be freezing. It is like that only because God arbitrarily decided that it should be. He could turn Glenn Beck into a bleeding-heart liberal if the fancy took him. Fox TV does not run training camps for Palestinian guerrillas only because God has whimsically decreed that it should not.

American ideology aspires to this Godlike freedom. There is a sense in which it is less concerned to worship the Creator than to take his place. It is now we, not he, who determine how things are. There is, however, a price to be paid for this privilege. What is valuable is what the will invests with value. But since this is pretty arbitrary, it comes close to admitting that there is no real value at all. Besides, how can we know that the will itself is valuable? We would seem incapable of coming up with some external standard by which to judge it. Another price human beings have to pay for this supreme sovereignty is that things no longer have integral identities of their own. To think so is the thought crime of “essentialism.” Their identities are in constant flux, always on the point of transmuting into something else as the whimsical will may decide. The flipside of a faith in the world’s plasticity is a belief in the dominative mind. If the will is to be omnipotent, reality must be softened up. It is the will, not forms and traditions, which dictates how the world should be. Yet there are many millions of such wills, all with different purposes. So how is the nation to be unified?

On this view, things are what we make them, a article of faith to which some of the early American settlers clung. The belief crops up again in modern-day relativism. I have taught highly intelligent American graduate students who believe that there are as many truths as there are individuals. If you are committed to the view that tapioca is a grain used in puddings, and I think it is a rather beautiful island in the Caribbean, both of us are right from our different points of view. This is simply one example of how postmodernism can addle the brains. Even truth has been privatised. Nor is this a recent American prejudice. As de Tocqueville comments, “each man is narrowly shut up in himself, and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world.” What you make of the world is not what I make of it. So freedom is at odds with consensus. It is hard to pluck an
unum
out of this
pluribus
, as the motto of the United States imagines we can.

The positive aspect of all this is its Protestant respect for individual judgement. My judgement may not be as sound as yours in practice, but it is certainly as good in principle. Beneath this view lies a deeply admirable egalitarianism. Yet if all of us are right in a way that admits of no argument, the only way we can decide the issue may be by fighting over it. Relativism can lead to violence. It is true that Oscar Wilde once described art as a phenomenon in which one thing can be true but also its opposite, but you can get away in art with things you cannot get away with in life, as Wilde was to learn to his cost.

De Tocqueville sees a link between America’s belief in infinite striving and its ethic of equality. In hierarchical societies, your rank defines your limits. It sketches the contours of the possible. The behaviour of an ancient Athenian rope maker was constrained by the requirement that he behave like an ancient Athenian rope maker. Where rank is less of an issue, anything seems conceivable, and the scope of human perfectibility, in de Tocqueville’s words, “is stretched beyond reason.” The typical citizen of such societies is “searching always, falling, picking himself up again, often disappointed, never discouraged.”

As far as rank goes, one might add that though the United States today is a grotesquely unequal society, its everyday culture is a good deal more egalitarian than that of Britain. There is a genuine classlessness about America’s behaviour, if not about its property structure. Like American frankness, pleasantness and sociability, this oils the wheels of social intercourse. By contrast, it is almost impossible for two Britons to meet without each of them instantly picking up the class signals emitted by the other, like animals who send each other messages in the form of low drones or high-pitched squeakings. To be sure after two minutes’ conversation that your companion attended an expensive private school is almost within the capacity of a British six-year-old. To know which school he attended requires a finer attunement of one’s social antennae, but is not out of the question.

Throwing out hierarchies, however, is more than just a political matter in the States. It is also a way of seeing the world. Things do not spontaneously sort themselves into an order of priorities. For some extreme versions of this viewpoint, nothing is inherently more significant than anything else, rather as a duke is not innately superior to a bootblack. In one sense, this is a deeply liberating attitude. It frees America from the gradations and exclusions of old Europe. It can break out of these rigid rankings to revaluate the whole of reality. This takes a degree of boldness and vision, and the United States has both in plenty. At the same time, there are limits to this outlook. Hierarchies of value die hard. It is difficult not to feel that curing leprosy is more important than powdering one’s nose. Much as one may hate being a hierarchicalist, one has to acknowledge a sneaking preference for preventing genocide over promoting the sale of jelly beans. Perhaps it is better to confess that one is sadly unreconstructed and try as hard as one can to find Rod Stewart as talented as Regina Spektor.

The anti-elitist spirit is part of America’s rejection of the Old World, in which everyone had an allotted place and was expected to keep to it. Against this, the United States believes in a radical equality of being. It is true that the American Dream, with its faith that anyone can scramble to the top, sounds rather more generous than it actually is. Anyone can jump off the Golden Gate Bridge as well, but not many actually do. (It is a sociological fact, incidentally, that those who do so tend to jump off facing the city of San Francisco rather than facing away from it.) “Anyone” sounds excitingly close to “everyone,” but it is also depressingly close to “no-one.” All the same, individuals could now be judged for themselves, not respected simply because they were the nephew of a count.

Once again, however, there are drawbacks to this doctrine. A doorman is as good as an arch-duke, and a piece of paper blown about by the breeze is as good as the end of the slave trade if that is what you believe. Everyone makes their own choices and sets their own priorities. What I say goes, and what you say goes as well, even if the two are mutually contradictory. It is better to be self-contradictory than exclusive. To be selective is to be elitist. This is why the great postmodern mantra is inclusivity. Nobody should ever be left out. Slave traffickers, the White Kentucky Riflemen for Jesus, and people who snatch your glasses jeeringly from your nose and scamper off with them down the street: all have their place in the great disorder of things. To shut out is to be negative, and negativity is among the most heinous of moral crimes. One can be criticised in the States for being critical.

Picking and Mixing