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.