VIEWING AMERICA FROM DOWN UNDER :

Understanding America (Owen Harries, Centre for Independent Studies Lecture presented in Sydney, Australia on April 3, 2002)

Lincoln at Gettysburg spoke of a nation 'conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition'. He spoke of reverence for the laws as 'the political religion of the nation'. As the writer Robert Penn Warren put it, 'To be an American is not . . . a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea-and [its] history is the image of that idea.'

Another writer, Theodore White: 'Americans are not a people like the French, Germans or Japanese, whose genes have been mixing with kindred genes for thousands of years. Americans are held together only by ideas.'

Many non-Americans have agreed. G. K. Chesterton maintained that 'America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.' And Margaret Thatcher has contrasted European nations, as the products of history, with the United States, as the product of a philosophy.

And so on and on. Now it would be very easy to dismiss all this as hyperbole, or hypocrisy. It is certainly true that America is many things as well as an idea-- a history; a set of customs and traditions; various institutions, political and otherwise; and, as we have become increasingly aware, a complex of power and interests. But ideas are a very important-an exceptionally important-part of the whole, and to the extent that Americans believe that these ideas are central to its identity and acts accordingly, it has important consequences.

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It was in the 1960s that the next great adaptations were made and a third major phase [of immigration] began. An extension of genuine political rights and access to the political creed took place to include America's black population, and immigration was opened up to include people of all races and ethnic composition: Hispanic, Asians, Africans, people from the Caribbean and Arabs. There are now over 32 million Hispanics and over 12 million Asians in the United States.

Something else of great importance happened as this third phase proceeded. The accepted metaphor for American society changed from a melting pot to a 'mosaic'. The old melting pot ideal was now increasingly condemned as authoritarian and conformist, and the theory and practice of multiculturalism began to prevail. Instead of assimilation, diversity and variety represented the ideal.

As this change occurred, the belief in America as representing an Idea was turned around. Previously it had been used to justify assimilation; now it became the basis of the argument that assimilation was unnecessary, and was used to justify cultural pluralism. If American nationalism consisted essentially of a common acceptance of a political creed or faith, the argument went, then it did not require the surrendering of original language, culture, tradition, folkways. Different peoples could retain all these and still be American as long as they accepted the political creed.

Many folks have seized upon this fine lecture simply as a counterbalance to the rather anti-American views we've been hearing from Western Europe in the wake of 9-11. And it is a stirring defense of the United States, but it is important not to treat it as a mere balm for our insecurities, because it also raises some questions about the future of the American Idea. Mr. Harries is, I take it, Australian and they are in the midst of a divisive national dialogue over immigration. An Anglo nation perched on the age of Asia, many Australians justifiably fear that their culture could not withstand the massive influx of Asian immigrants who would justifiably like to get out of such benighted nations as China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma (or Myanmar), North Korea, etc. So he marvels at how America has withstood successive waves of immigration without losing its distinctly American identity. Yet he correctly points out that in recent years (what he refers to as our "third major phase"), we have compromised the American Idea, have assumed that the culture of America was fairly unimportant so long as the political structure was adhered to.

This is a dangerous, perhaps even suicidal, experiment that we are engaged in, for there is no evidence that a culture other than the traditional Anglo-American culture--that odd mixture of Judeo-Christian ideals, ancient Greco-Roman institutions, Enlightenment rationalism, and fierce Saxon individualism that gave rise to the American Idea--can long sustain a liberal pluralistic capitalist democracy. Mr. Harries discusses the condescending way in which European intellectuals and statesmen treat America as a "young" nation, needing guidance, despite the fact that are have the longest lived, most stable, most thoroughly tested, and freest democratic republic on Earth. Something has made us different than the rest of the world, we are exceptional. Perhaps the multiculturalists are right and this is solely a function of our political system, but, first of all, I doubt it and, second, I think it's idiotic to risk our future on the possibility that it may be true.

Many nations have tried many forms of constitutional democracy with varying degrees of success, but none has lasted very long before succumbing to either chaos or repression, even if only the somewhat benevolent repression of European-style socialism. Surely if all it took to create an American Republic was a bare framework someone else would have duplicated the feat by now. That they have not and that the closest that anyone has come is in other former British colonies, like Canada and Australia, and that the only nascent democracies in many parts of the world are likewise former British colonies, Israel, India, South Africa, etc., or nations where authoritarian rulers tried to reform their native cultures along Anglo-American lines by brute force (Turkey, Iran, etc.) suggests rather strongly that there is a cultural element that is vital to the creation and maintenance of a truly free nation. It appears from all this evidence, not surprisingly, that the American Idea may be inextricably bound up with traditional American culture, that our heritage of Hellenism, Judaism, Christianity, Enlightenment, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Republicanism must be valued, nurtured, and handed down from one generation to the next, else we risk the passing of the Idea, risk the demise of America as we know it.

There are of course those, and the multiculturalists feature prominently among them, who would welcome the decline of America into the same kind of deracinated, overregulated, moribund, socialist society that we now find throughout Western Europe. The population of these countries may be shrinking, but they do undoubtedly provide greater social security to the few who remain; they may not produce much wealth, but what they do produce is certainly distributed more equally; they may not produce much in the way of culture anymore, but that makes them amenable to virtually any cultural beliefs; they may not have any beneficial influence in world affairs anymore, but by the same taken they have little negative influence either; they may be dying, but they are dying a fairly comfortable death.

America, on the other hand, even though diminished by its own flirtation with multiculturalism, is still pretty rambunctious. Our elites may talk a good game of accepting all cultures as equally useful, but when push comes to shove, we hardly hesitate to slap down those that threaten us, whether fascist, communist, or Islamofascist. The chattering class may worry about overpopulation, but we are one of the decreasing number of Western nations that continues to reproduce at least at replacement level. We may shuck and jive about our desire to be a compassionate people, but given a choice between government run medicine for everyone or private medicine that we control ourselves, we don't hesitate to choose choice. We may all desire to see ourselves as tres modern and cosmopolitan, but, unlike the rest of the West, we maintain a stubborn resistance to Darwin and Einstein and Nietzsche and Chomsky and all the rest who would tell us that God is dead and religion a thing of the past, that Man, along with the rest of the universe, is an accident and that nothing means anything unless we say so. But for how much longer, if we do decide to discard our culture (Western Civilization), will America remain the boisterous, freedom-loving, last best hope of Man?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2002 9:05 PM