Three Words

Addendum #34

Three Words

When in doubt at to events in the United States, a doubt that has been often, I have been prone to consult one of Richard Hofstadter’s books. Recently, I took Social Darwinism in American Thought, Hofstadter’s first book, off the shelf and began reading about the various notions that have animated and that continue to animate how Americans think about themselves, though “think” may be too strong a word. In reading, I had once more, that peculiar feeling about the United States, which has to do with how much attention gets paid to what the nation might be (or somehow was) while the wheels of commerce, industrialism, and technology roll along in their corporate, quarterly-earnings way. Concerning the belief in endless economic progress or “growth” as it is often called, much goes without saying (as in who profits from this “growth”) while while other matters may get too much saying, or are simply bruited as a slogan – “Make America Great Again” – that for some signifies something, while managing to mean nothing, and thus making for a sort of brimming emptiness Donald Trump has been only too eager to commandeer.

The nation was founded before commerce took its large bite out of the nation’s putative soul, that yearning about happiness and freedom that is to the founders’ credit, however traduced such yearning was by slavery and the persecution of the Native people. One way to look at the current state of affairs is to admit how confused and ambivalent from the start the nation has been, full of high-mindedness and low-mindedness. (I want to write “equally full” but that isn’t the case now at all.) In that sense, Americans seem the last people to ask about anything, much less trust when they do things like invade other nations. What could Americans possibly know given the chasm between aims and means? The story begins and ends with their having had the better part of a continent to exploit. That so many Americans feel that exploitation has been a God-given right tells any onlooker from elsewhere how deceived Americans can be, how Americans have literally been high on energy.

I was stopped short in reading Hofstadter when he brought up Herbert Croly, author of The Promise of American Life (published in 1909), a staunch reformer, and one of the founding editors of The New Republic in 1914. I quote Hofstadter who in part quotes Croly: “Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life made a fervent plea for the abandonment of the traditional American ‘mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism’ in favor of a more positive attempt to realize the national promise. He urged that Americans learn to think in terms of purpose rather than destiny, and, without fear of the centralizing power of government, to realize their purpose through a national policy.” One can say, “So much for fervent pleas” and throw one’s hands up but those three words – “optimism, fatalism, and conservatism” – remain like hopeless beacons shining in a very dark night.

The words intrigue for many reasons, not the least of which is their seeming lack of fraternity. What is, for instance, a fatalistic optimist? Is that the undertone I sometimes feel from a clerk in a store who tells me to have a good one but who gives off a vibe that feels more like “These unlovely fluorescent lights tell you the story, man: I’m fucked, you’re fucked, and we’re all fucked”? Or are optimism and fatalism compartments that somehow exist separately in the American psyche? As in, hey, I’m an American so I’m cheerful. Land of opportunity. We’re all in this self-improvement gig together. Can do. Yet I’m an American who as an individualist feels the government owes me nothing, that everything is my problem and my doing, that history doesn’t have any bearing on anyone’s circumstances, and that I shouldn’t complain because things could be worse. And I’m a conservative in the sense that I want to hold onto my American sense of things yet I love technology and the newest invention and don’t really want to conserve anything, especially if I have to give up anything or make allowances for the health of the planet because I’m optimistic and think things will work out for the best for us Americans because, hey, we’re Americans. So I’m somewhat inclined to glib cheer, somewhat inclined to be a self-satisfied know-nothing, and somewhat inclined to believe someone is fucking me over and I can’t do a thing about it. A grand combination.

As to “promise,” it is a nice thought and not much more. One wonders about an American promise that amounts to more than getting my own since the point of the United States would seem to be about getting my own. And as to “purpose” as opposed to “destiny,” I can applaud Croly for wanting to abandon the anxious, overbearing notion that the nation must have a destiny to fulfill while it is unable, for instance, to take the time in the course of a day to eat wholesome food from carefully nourished soil on farms that are not factories. Unfortunately “purpose” that relies on government, particularly a government subject to elections and the whirligig of events, of economic lows and highs, of the turmoil of other nations, of national boasts, lies, and doubts to say nothing of sheer manias about all that is “un-American,” seems a very frail reed. The current wrecking crew, since economics are divorced from politics, has a free hand that has been promoted since the Reagan era. Corporate greed is not an enemy nor is the military-industrial complex that gives back nothing of worth to the society nor is the mendacity of the elected representatives who are beholden to moneyed interests. No, the enemy, since Americans need enemies to assert who they are and what they stand for, is someone doing a job to maintain a semblance of a civil society.

“Policy” is a fine word but, again, we can see at the present moment how policy can amount to not much more than one man’s ego and a brandished sword. The United States, as a political invention rather than the outgrowth of centuries of shared consciousness and culture, seems bound to keep reinventing itself and glibly ruining itself in the name of “efficiency” or some other unhappy shibboleth. Destiny dies hard. The rest of the world has good reason to be wary of the preening American visage admiring itself in a cloudy mirror.