In 1997, I met an elegant foreign traveler, a retired diplomat, at the Dupont Circle Starbucks in Washington, DC. This gentleman had been in the United States for a month, and he told me that he had enjoyed himself enormously and admired many things about American culture. He wondered, though, why Americans tolerated what seemed to him an appalling rate of violence, much higher than in other Western countries. Instinctively roused to the defense, I extemporized. I said that I thought the violence of American culture was inseparable from the very freedom and dynamism he admired. Our strong concept of individual liberty implied the right to use violence in defense of that liberty, and this ethos inevitably led to a good deal of violence that was not political but nonetheless had its roots in our national self-conception. On balance, I said, this was a tradeoff worth making. I confess I was a little pleased with my argument and with myself, as young people often are—such cogency! My traveling friend, however, seemed politely puzzled. Don’t citizens in a society plagued by random violence, he asked, have less freedom rather than more?
This conversation brought me to an awareness of the self-referential nature of a national culture. National cultures are guided by internal logic, comprised largely of unconscious assumptions that are destined to remain somewhat mysterious to outsiders. That history had made winners of America was evident enough. It had not occurred to me that we weren’t right about most things, certainly about all the essential things. That visitor’s tug on a single cultural thread—why so much violence?—reminded me that even in high-functioning societies, there is much that happens because of the inertia of custom rather than the work of deliberation. We do things in a certain way because we’ve always done them that way. These assumptions create blind spots; they also give us a sense of emotional unity without which no nation can long survive. What is America like? America is a place where in gangster movies the audience roots for the criminals.
The Mystery of National Character
When George Orwell was composing his essay “England Your England,” in the late summer and fall of 1940, his country was facing extinction. Paris had fallen to the German Army, hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers had been forced to evacuate at Dunkirk, and the Luftwaffe was terrorizing the populations of London, Coventry, and Bristol. Orwell opens, with his characteristic dryness, “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” Things could not have looked any worse. And yet he wrote in serene confidence not just that victory was possible but that it was inevitable.
Orwell’s confidence rested not upon an assessment of the military situation but rather on the character of the English people. The book in which “England Your England” appeared, The Lion and the Unicorn, was subtitled “Socialism and the English Genius.” What was that “genius,” and why was Orwell certain of it as a guarantor of his nation’s survival? To be sure, it was not genius in any ordinary sense, but something more prosaic. (Of Orwell himself, Lionel Trilling wrote, “He was not a genius, and this is one of the remarkable things about him.”) He wrote that the “gentleness of English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic…. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers.” But behind the English quietism, the passion for privacy, the “lack of philosophical faculty,” lay the unconscious bonds that would see them through the hardships to come.
In the interplay between characteristic small things (“The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier”) and larger questions of faith and ideology (“the common people are without definite religious belief”) lies the mystery of national character. Orwell defined English character in both negative and positive terms. As a negative phenomenon, it was made up of the English “hatred of war and militarism.” In positive terms, it lay in their instinct to rally to the cause when their nation was threatened. For Orwell, the Englishman was intensely patriotic but suspicious of nationalist sentiment—easy to recruit to his duty but, unlike those peoples who had come under the sway of fascism and communism, resistant to manipulation in the service of false gods.
One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power.… Why is the goose-step not used in England?… It is not used because the people in the street would laugh.
Patriotism is no less real for being extra-rational, even atavistic. Orwell believed that to succeed, the British left of which he was a part would have to embrace the common culture of English life, the “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.” From the love of such things is political legitimacy derived. “As a positive force,” he wrote, “there is nothing to set beside [patriotism]…. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.”
Orwell was constantly called back to his Oxfordshire youth, whose countryside provided his warmest memories. The approach of modernity on that world made him gloomy. Thus, his emphasis on the continuity of national identity—the “devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.” His deepest attachment was to the England of 1912. Yet his writing life was future-directed, toward the creation of a world without totalitarianism and in which ordinary people lived decently. He drew strength from the tension between these two motives; in The Lion and the Unicorn, he sought to place them in equipoise. Orwell was a committed socialist, but his solidarity with left opinion was weakening, enervated by differences over how Britain should respond to Hitler, divided on the value of physical courage. “England Your England” represents, on a personal level, the transfer of his deepest loyalty from the Labour Party to the St. George’s Cross.
Given that his motive was the promotion of national unity, it is remarkable how much of “England Your England” is given over to criticism of his country, which he thought undemocratic, barbarous, anachronistic. Indeed, for Orwell, England was just short of ridiculous in its concentration of money and political power, its provinciality (“[n]early every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly”), its “hypocritical” attitude about the British Empire—but was finally not ridiculous, in fact was made great by the hardiness and the innocent love of country its people shared, the “tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of crisis.” For Orwell, national character is destiny. “A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip.” This agronomic metaphor is characteristic of Orwell, for whom, when speaking of the most serious things, the temptation to grandiosity must be all the more strenuously resisted.
The Idea of Americanness
“Till recently,” Orwell wrote, “it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike.” At a high enough level of generality, of course, people are alike. They are alike in loving their children, in their belief that local women are the most beautiful and the local cuisine the best. And yet Orwell was right, of course, when he wrote that “one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook…in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behavior differs enormously from country to country.” Logic and experience tell us this is so. No one would undertake the expense and inconvenience of foreign travel if all he expected to carry back to Kansas City in his luggage was a matryoshka doll and some tired nostrum to the effect that “people are just the same everywhere when you get right down to it.”
It is not self-evident, however, that the idea of national character is as easily defended in relation to the United States as it was to Orwell’s England. England in 1940 was a self-enclosed island nation, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically homogenous. By contrast, we Americans are 340 million people spread across a vast continent, racially heterogeneous, many of us with familial and cultural roots that are shallow here by virtue of recent family immigration. We are also de-historicizing as fast as we can, moving from the tired, older places of the North and East to places like Florida and Arizona, where the American idea seems fresher. You can’t reinvent yourself in Fall River, Massachusetts, especially if you keep running into your twelfth-grade English teacher at the Stop & Shop.
The American idea is potent but protean, befitting a people on the move, swimming with the currents of history. Our founding principles do not conduce to a strong concept of national character. Americanness as a communal idea is always in tension with Americanness as a guarantor of individual liberty, even individual churlishness, held sacred. Shared American identity does not necessarily imply mutual esteem or even common interest. We regard each other warily from opposite sides of a figurative boundary fence, each ideally master of their own domain.
The adjective American does not describe a race, as does Japanese, or invoke a concept of homeland, as does Russian, but is largely a political designation. Nonetheless we have our characteristic habits; there are things that happen, as Orwell says of his England, that could only happen here. Probably the imagery of the movies has captured Americanness best: the small-town sentimentalism of It’s A Wonderful Life (1946); Sylvester Stallone running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Rocky (1976); Meryl Streep’s mercurial activist in Silkwood (1983). Lately Hollywood has mostly abandoned the task of defining Americanness for us, because the audience for its deracinated product is no longer predominantly American. Whatever fills that entertainment vacuum seems likely to be worse.
What do we mean by character? We mean the collective inheritance of a people as expressed in their attitudes and gestures. We mean something that is partly conscious and partly unconscious. We mean something that is both upstream and downstream of politics. I once had a West Indian friend explain to me that Jamaicans are “a bellicose people.” I have no idea whether that is true of Jamaicans. But he was talking about character—a kind of latent default setting that crisis makes manifest. Politics may be thought of in one sense as the necessary compromise made by political actors between their goals and the character of the people they purport to lead.
To me, the United States means political freedom but also, owing to our historical stability, no special urgency about exercising it. It means regional differences, which are a durable source of comedy and also, occasionally, if you find yourself at the wrong rest stop, a source of unease. It means the ability to have an ordinary, common, “good” life that would have been beyond the imagining of people who lived even a few hundred years ago. Above all, the United States means getting to have your life on more or less your own terms, getting to fail, getting to confront emptiness, but also enjoying, because your choices are yours and yours alone, the inner life of a monarch. So many of our political and cultural fault lines can be thought of in terms of character—that is, as arguments about our history and about the type of people we believe ourselves to be. We are increasingly urban, cosmopolitan, and multiracial, but we didn’t start out that way. It’s probably not realistic to expect this change to be greeted with the same enthusiasm everywhere.
When I speak of American character, my claim is this: I believe I could sit across the table from, for example, a second-generation Mexican-American living in Phoenix or Los Angeles, and both understand him and make myself understood in return. (I am from New England and now live in New York.) That is not to say we would agree—only that we would have enough shared cultural vocabulary for conversation to be at least potentially fruitful. After a couple of hours, we would get up from the table knowing, at least, who the other person was. I am not as optimistic that I could achieve the same thing with a middle-class lawyer from Zurich or Antwerp, despite our shared professional training and social class. The superficial consonance of our manners and tastes would, paradoxically, be an obstacle to true understanding, because it would mask deeper differences.
The forms taken by a nation’s sports and games may offer clues to national identity. In describing the physical grace of Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the “resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.” The game Fitzgerald had chiefly in mind was probably baseball, which in his era reflected the pastoral values of a nation of small communities, a nation that was just beginning to become urban and modern in ways that were Fitzgerald’s enduring subject.
Of course, our national pastime is now football, a very different sort of game. In many American places, the high-school football coach is one of the leading citizens. He is a moral beacon to young people and the most visible symbol of the team whose success on Friday nights is essential to the community’s identity. He carries, in his speech and demeanor, in the car he drives, in his choice of spouse, the sense of “this is who we are.” He is usually an avowed Christian, and he is expected at church on Sunday morning, though his wayward personal conduct will be excused so long as he wins. When he leads his team onto the field, it is likely that every adult male in the stands unconsciously identifies with him.
Football is the sport of the American suburbs and exurbs. It is the sport of places where size is part of the ethos—places where the houses, the vehicles, even the human beings are all big. Our national mythology, however, still lies in the towns and villages we left behind. The culture of football helps us mediate that difference—the difference between our deepest communal values and the reality of our increasingly anonymous modern lives. Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights (1990), an account of high-stakes high-school football in the Permian Basin of West Texas, a surviving redoubt of frontier capitalism and extreme self-reliance, captures the uneasy truce between collective longing and personal liberty. Life is hard in Odessa, Texas, but one at least enjoys that final, saving consolation of American identity: that one is, despite hardship, in some crucial sense, “free.”
That the concept of the Great American Novel has no cognate in England is instructive. Of course, England actually has a national novel, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), whose closing lines so movingly extol the modest, homely virtue that Orwell identified with the best of Englishness. Eliot wrote of her cultivated and idealistic heroine, Dorothea Brooke, that “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” No American novelist would set up so self-effacing a woman as a national paragon; those “hidden lives” are just the ones we left behind in the old country. Accordingly, the Great American Novel must remain merely a provocation. We are sure the category is destined to remain empty—sure, that is, that we are so rich and various and highly colored that no single imagination could take us all in. If Orwell’s English were great in humility, we are great in greatness, great in feeling the full force of our own energies.
An impressive paradox of American life is that we host a large percentage of the world’s leading research universities while being, in terms of the aspirations of the average American, strongly, even insolently, anti-intellectual. This is a remaining inheritance of our English forebears, of whom Orwell wrote, “They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view.’” In America, as in Orwell’s England, hostility to intellectual culture is one of the privileges of living in a large and powerful country. Labor market specialization means that an American can earn a considerable salary without possessing much general knowledge or engaging his critical faculties. This narrow-gauge intensity extends to both social and professional life. We choose some highly specialized domain—pit-barbecue cooking, last-mile logistics—and, having achieved local distinction in that field, we feel that we have joined an aristocracy. Again, this is a local outgrowth of empire, the confidence that everything that happens is inherently interesting simply because it happens here.
A corollary to our lack of intellectual aspiration is that we Americans tend to be voluble but not especially rich in our speech. We are “talkers,” but our linguistic strategy is that of the salesperson: to overwhelm opposition. Since the commercial motive predominates with us, it follows that we are not overly scrupulous as to truth. The truth is what is legal to say to a customer; the truth is what you can get away with. Since we value language largely for its instrumental properties, we also are not known for our humor. As a result, we suffer too much sanctimony, not to say religious charlatanry, because often there is no one around to skewer it.
Orwell’s presiding metaphor for England was that of a family—except that, as he claimed, England was a family “with the wrong members in control,” “ruled largely by the old and silly.” The family is obviously not the right metaphor for America. The necessary connotations of intimacy and interdependence are absent. In fact, the claims that America makes on its inhabitants have always been relatively weak, and they are mostly negative claims (chiefly, that we respect the rights of others) rather than positive ones (for example, that we place American nationality at the center of our personal identity). Our politicians treat us as though we were their customers, but a confident nation should not be afraid to remind its citizens of their responsibilities, too. Earlier generations of American immigrants eagerly sought the status of “American.” Now many are eager to disclaim it in favor of hybrid identities: Irish-American, Korean-American, etc. We all would like to enjoy the benefits of empire without taking up its moral burden.
Change and Yet Remain the Same
Orwell knew that England’s sclerotic class system would have to end. He knew the British Empire would have to end, too. He believed, though, that Englishness was more durable even than these things. He believed that England would “change out of recognition and yet remain the same”—that is, transform its politics but still be visible, through some faint but ineradicable marks, as England.
Already, though, the Great Britain that once dominated the world was beginning to slip into the past tense. The triumph over fascism that “England Your England” foretold was, in fact, the beginning of the end of Britain as a world power—and therefore the end of Englishness as a normative idea. By 2000, the philosopher Roger Scruton, in his book England: An Elegy, was asserting that the nation in which he had been raised was gone. “My intention,” he wrote, “is…to pay a personal tribute to the civilization that made me and which is now passing from the world.” Echoing Orwell, Scruton believed that a distinctive and valuable national ethos was being abandoned in favor of something altogether worse. “England furnished us with an ideal, and the English people acquired some of the gentleness, amiability and civilized manners which that ideal prescribed. What the English people have become since is, to my mind, a proof that ideals are important.” Great Britain still matters to Americans as our historical progenitor and for its ongoing role in the Anglosphere. Orwell’s England, however, is as dead as Ozymandias.
I am properly conscious of the immense, unearned privilege of being an American. At the same time, I am displeased when I hear other Americans recite, “This is the greatest country in the world.” I don’t like the work those words are doing, the insecurity they are papering over. They are jingoistic rather than properly patriotic—the sort of thing put to rhetorical use by people with a shallow sense of our history, who do not really understand the struggle and sacrifice that have made their own country “great.” The larger point is this: Our patriotism is empty—it is merely the braying of a schoolyard bully—if its primary purpose is not to evoke in us a sense of responsibility. As a claim of entitlement, it is rebarbative. We have overcome worse obstacles than those we face today: the Civil War and Reconstruction; the Depression; the long national breath-holding between Pearl Harbor and Normandy. What we lack, suddenly, is the ability to call upon those experiences and make of them a credible ethos.
The gap between our self-image and our image abroad grows constantly. In most of the world, we are now regarded at best with tolerant amusement, like gifted but naive children. To be American means being condescended to, often by people from places one knows to be largely dysfunctional. Not that we pay much attention. We are like Orwell’s English, who he said were notable in their “refusal to take foreigners seriously.” Such an attitude is another privilege of our economic and military power, our linguistic hegemony, our geographic isolation. Consistent with my own American character, I am impatient with the opinions of Europeans about my country, which are generally based on a combination of limited understanding and an unearned and ultimately defensive air of superiority.
One reads that lawyers and accountants who advise high-net-worth families are seeing increased demand from their clients for second passports. These rattled oligarchs are, in the argot of the wealth-management professional, “hedging against US political instability.” I wonder about the mindset that imagines that the ultimate freedom is expressed by one’s having no allegiances at all. In his thirties, Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, spending six months on the Aragon front. He cared enough about the Spanish Republic to die for it and nearly did. But he understood the confluence of personal and national destiny. As he wrote in “England Your England,” “devotion to one’s country implies ‘for better, for worse.’…[A]bove all, [your nation] is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time.… Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.”