America Is An Old Country
America’s destiny is conditioned by the fact that she is an old and not young nation, as far as essential age goes. America represents, in world history, the old age of Europe. Uncle Sam, an elderly gentleman, symbolizes the United States. The Pilgrim Fathers, stern Puritans, Founding Fathers, the grandfatherly character of America’s nineteenth-century intellectuals, the moralizing tone of American idealism, the lined parchment-like faces of Fords and Rockefellers, nothing in America’s living symbols suggests real youth. The triumph of machinery, the love of gadgets, the mechanization of the mind for the sake of comfort, always denote the oldster’s outlook. America’s apparent youthfulness has nothing in common with the organic youth of Europe’s dynamic Culture in its Gothic and Renaissance phases, with the insatiable curiosity and innate cruelty which is typical of youth. The soul of America is essentially old and mature, as Rome’s was, and therefore more qualified to organize the world than the perpetually troublesome Greeks and Europeans who switched abruptly from youth to senility without even being mature.
Yet, in another sense, America is young with the youth of physical dynamism and vigor, a mature, optimistic youth that contrasts with Europe’s tired, wizened old age about to enter its second childhood. But this youth applies largely to the economic sphere, where successful development was purchased at the price of virtual petrifaction in most other domains. James Bryce had already remarked generations ago that “the people have the hopefulness of youth. But their institutions are old, though many have been remodeled or new faced; their religion is old, their views of morality and conduct are old.” This essential oldness is rooted in an eighteenth-century atmosphere whose optimism still survives in America and wears the mask of youth, but has disappeared in Europe as outdated. It is both a great blessing and a limitation, a psychological disposition that could bloom easily in the vacuum of the last century when America was largely isolated, but is not so easy to preserve in our own turbulent century.
This maturity is the source of America’s basic conservatism—once again, in all matters save economic development—which is often masked by a taste for superficial change and a restlessness that has little in common with revolutionary transformation. Here also, Bryce remarked that Americans “have what chemists call low specific heat; they grow warm suddenly and cool as suddenly,” and insisting on their basic conservatism in spite of their volatile temperament, he added that “they are like a tree whose pendulum shoots quiver and rustle with the lightest breeze, while its roots enfold the rock with a grasp which storms cannot loosen.” It is this fundamental conservatism that gives Americans in the modern world a position almost identical with that of the Romans, a conservatism bolstered by the complete ascendancy of the conservative-minded sex—women. A Civilization can be secured only on conservative foundations, even though its economic development may have revolutionary repercussions in the alien societies that are exposed to it.
Very much like the Romans, the Americans are remarkably unindividualized. Group consciousness among them is paramount, with its attendant worship of quantity, masses, collective impulses, with generalized stereotypes such as the “man in the street” or the “common man.” This implies not an advanced but on the contrary an early stage of development, since individualized stages in history evolve out of this primitive phase with the growth of Culture. The dawn of Civilization, therefore, represents a partial return to the unindividualized stage in which group consciousness and social concerns predominate, but on a far higher technical level. Psychologically, it is the primitive tribal collectivism blown up to mammoth dimensions. And this in turn explains the apparent similarities between Americans and Russians in our century, similarities that the alarmed Europeans find often disquieting and always baffling. This psychological collectivism is the historic destination of American evolution, the ultimate goal; to the Russians, it is the starting point, the early stages from which, in centuries to come, we can expect to see the growth and development of a new individualism.
The Pilgrim and Founding Fathers were far more individualized than present-day Americans, who live in a world of compulsory gregariousness and mass suggestion, whose ideal is normalcy and whose essential characteristic is like-mindedness. Contemporary Americans display a profound hostility toward human differentiation and deny the very existence of differences in human values. It was only on such a basis that democratic equality was made possible. Imbued with a statistical mentality, the Americans were gradually driven to view quantity as a symbol of quality because they lost the ability to differentiate between them.
The constant emphasis on economic well-being and standard of living has, led many foreigners to refer to America’s “materialism.” But it is a fundamental misconception. Americans have, unconsciously and mostly out of sheer idealism, reduced man to an animal level, although an animal in command of fabulous technical powers. The heart of Behaviorism lies in this raising and educating human beings as conditioned, domesticated animals. They hardly allow any influence at all to free will and recognize man only as a creature of habit, a second nature that can be shaped almost entirely from the outside by the right type of education and environment. Metaphysical or spiritual realities beyond the animal level are simply ignored or given only lip service. Society is the all-inclusive absolute, a substitute for the Almighty. There is nothing beyond but a Platonic realm of abstractions having no vital connections with the world of everyday living.
The fact that many native American institutions—Christian Science, for instance—proclaim the exact opposite means only that they are contrast-phenomena, psychological compensations for the prevailing American outlook on life. Man responds as predictably to a given stimulus as an animal and that is enough. Fundamentalists can vituperate against this prevailing outlook, but they cannot alter it.
The emphasis on man’s animal nature can lead only to a virtual destruction of his individual freedom, since it automatically emphasizes the typical inertia of animal nature at the expense of man’s greatest human asset: free will, the result of personal striving and conscious suffering. Education, up to a point, has always meant the training of man’s animal nature but the conscious emphasis on animalism has never before been as deliberate. Yet, with all its drawbacks and its inevitable impoverishment of human nature, this exaggerated insistence on man’s animalism is at the root of America’s extraordinary success in technological matters—one that the more refined, differentiated Europeans can never hope to match, one that also gives American youth the typical self-assurance that never fails to astound Europeans.
The result is that, since nothing is done to enhance and develop the exceptional creative talent for its own sake, American man is static in an individual sense although American society as a whole is dynamic. Americans hardly ever make basic discoveries but can endlessly adapt, improve and mass produce European discoveries. They research endlessly but rarely contemplate. Fundamental scientific discoveries are the result of disinterested contemplation. A psychological attitude which tends to concentrate on immediate usefulness is not conducive to the birth of profound thoughts and basic discoveries, since their practical applications are not immediately apparent. Culture provides the necessary atmosphere for disinterested contemplation, Civilization for utilitarian research. One favors thought, the other experiment. From Newton to Einstein, from Pasteur to Fleming, Europe has produced, at very little financial expense, the great thoughts which have rolled back the frontiers of man’s scientific knowledge. At an expense of almost four billion dollars a year, American research exploits Europe’s basic discoveries but cannot really progress beyond it in a fundamental way. And, not only the utilitarian atmosphere, but also the democratic idea that research’s team-work enables the “common man” to substitute for the creative genius, stands in the way of fundamental scientific progress.
The social repercussions of these psychological dispositions are far reaching. Quantitative standards, along with social equality, have given to the dollar sign a symbolic value it has nowhere else. It has nothing to do with the alleged worship of money but with its symbolic implications. An artist, professor, or government official in Europe can be and usually is badly remunerated. Yet, the European belief in qualitative differences gives them a prestige and consideration that are ample compensation. This has never been the case in America, where mediocre financial returns indicate almost invariably social inferiority. In an equalitarian society, financial income is the only index that is geared exclusively to quantitative standards, and its exclusive domination has had devastating effects on American society. In a title is conferred on a British physician, an academic degree on a German scholar, or a decoration on a French artist, the prestige value of money is destroyed. It implies the recognition that along with democratic equality there is a hierarchy of talent that rises above it.
The result is that Americans consistently mistake causes for effects. The democratic habit of considering the verdict of a numerical majority as evidently the best has practically eliminated the notion that the majority can be wrong after all, that an autonomous spirit can have different claims. In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers made provision against such tyranny of the multitude because they still lived in an aristocratic age when the feeling for differences in Being was vivid. Today, however, the psychological pressure of conformity is overwhelming and contributes to the degradation of activities that are not strictly businesslike. As a consequence, the constitutional safeguards of the Founding Fathers are being by-passed by the increasing psychological standardization of the American people. The fear of originality and nonconformity has become a far more powerful deterrent than any legal or political oppression, creating a psychological climate in which individual freedom is not destroyed from the outside but effectively and voluntarily crippled from the inside. The resulting type of society, to a foreigner, looks very much like that of an ant heap.
Here again, the Roman-American convergence is remarkable. The Roman libertas was as limited when compared with Greece’s anarchic eleutheria as the American freedom when compared with the French liberté. Roman and American freedom from arbitrary rule is always lawful and orderly, a freedom fettered by psychological conformity and the subordination of the individual to the welfare of society.
This is no sudden mutation in America but the result of long-term development. More than a hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville had already remarked: “I know no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” And he added: “In that immense crowd which throngs the avenues to power in the United States, I found very few men who displayed that manly candor and masculine independence of opinion which frequently distinguished the Americans in former times….It seems at first sight as if all the minds of the Americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they follow the same route.” A psychological disposition that reaches as far back as the Jacksonian era is not going to be reversed easily.
Furthermore, it received added impetus later on with the necessity absorbing millions of immigrants—the “melting pot” policy with its compulsory uniformization and Americanization. In turn this contributed to create a nation of gregarious extroverts who were purged of all the inherited instincts of the Old World. This resulted in a steady leveling down of all Americans to a common denominator and this growing psychological standardization is made evident by the increasing convergence of all Americans toward one single type, however many the superficial variations. American democracy does not give free play to the development of exceptional talent—as had been fondly hoped by eighteenth-century democrats—but on the contrary to the peaceful destruction of all nonconformist elements. Americans are highly differentiated in their abilities and specializations but they are more uniform as beings, more true to type than any other people in the world.
Where, then, does freedom reside in America? Mostly in the fact that the individual American is physically more independent of other human beings than anywhere else in the world. To the extent that he dominates machinery and is not enslaved by it, his technical mastery enables him to be free from the material want that crushes so many other people throughout the world. He can live on a far higher level without depending on human labor. He has become in the modern world the equivalent of the self-respecting Roman citizen whose slaves have been transmuted into mechanical gadgets. And this, not merely as an ideal but as a fact which becomes more definite every day.
American freedom derives additional strength from its emancipation from the shackles of history, from the memory of past loves and hatreds, cramping traditions, a weakening knowledge of past failures—all things that clutter the minds of Europeans and above which they can no longer rise by themselves. Europe in the twentieth century knows its past but no longer possesses enough vitality to dominate it and use it constructively. Europe sighs and groans with the pain of thousands of grievous self-inflicted wounds that can no longer heal because the European body is organically old. America is free from such pain and wounds, free to face a new world optimistically and shape it. With all its limitations the psychological disposition of Americans is a happy one. Through voluntary limitation of its possibilities and interest, through a partial immolation of individualism, American society today comes closer to the utopia men have been dreaming of for thousands of years than any other in the world.
-excerpted from “The Coming Caesars” by Amaury de Reincourt (1957)