Across the Pond (10 page)

Americans, by contrast, like to be up and doing. They find it hard to savour the delights of passivity. They are relatively unfamiliar with the spiritual treasures to be reaped from being acted on rather than acting. For them, there is something both guilt-making and unmanly about such a condition. Steve Jobs’s sister, thinking she was paying him a compliment, described his death as something he “achieved.” Simply to have something happen to you is unthinkable. It undermines the vital business of being in control. Bed is where the body refreshes itself in order to plunge back into action. To enjoy it for its own sake is mildly perverse, rather like enjoying having rabies. The Duke of Edinburgh was once horrified to discover that his son Prince Charles actually reads in bed. Reading for the Duke is something of a degenerate activity in any case, but to confuse sleeping and waking life in this way struck him as morally pernicious. Bed is a preparation for activity, not a condition to be enjoyed in itself. It is certainly not a place in which to indulge such wimpish pursuits as learning about the secrets of the Pyramids or the inner life of vegetables, as the New Ageist Charles probably does.

Nature and the Will

America’s disquiet with the body is not just the familiar tale of dieting, obesity, frenetic exercising, or trying to thread your jaws together with wire and a pair of pliers in front of the bathroom mirror. The country has a problem with the body because it has a problem with the finite. The desire which drives the nation—its hunger for progress, achievement, expansion, advancement, possession, consumption—is an infinite one which brooks no restraint. On this view, there are no natural limits to aspiration, only those obstacles thrown up by one’s failure to achieve. It is a vision of reality far removed from Macbeth’s “I dare do all that may become a man;/Who dares do more is none.” It does not see that some confines are creative rather than obstructive, some limits enabling rather than impeding. In a time-worn Romantic fallacy, expansion and self-expression are viewed as good in themselves, and what is bad is whatever reins them in. One thing which thwarts them is the body, which must therefore be worked upon intensively. Human flesh is appallingly feeble. It must be disciplined and remoulded if anything good is to be plucked from it, rather as some conservatives hold that people must be bawled out and knocked around if they are to give of their best.

On this view, what is supremely positive is the will. In a certain sense, it is all that exists. The will is a raw force that pounds the world into order, and occasionally pounds it to pieces. This includes the body, which is the bit of the material world which is part of us. In order to shape things to its needs, however, the will risks knocking the stuffing out of them, leaving them void, valueless, and so not really worth shaping in the first place. Yet it can do its work all the better if there is no meaning inherent in the world itself. Once things are drained of significance, they put up less resistance to one’s projects. Reality becomes endlessly pliable stuff. It can be pummelled into whatever form you fancy, as in the gym or cosmetic surgery. “Political principles, laws, and human institutions,” comments de Tocqueville of America, “seem malleable things which can at will be adopted and combined.” Maybe even our mortality will buckle in the end to the all-conquering mind. Among the most typically American features of Michael Jackson was the fact that he wanted to live forever, a wish which not every member of the world’s population was eager to see realised.

The will lies at the core of the self, which means that the self is what bestows meaning and value on things. But the self is also part of material reality. So we, too, are part of what has to be hammered into shape. We are clay in our own hands, awaiting the moment when we will transform ourselves into an artefact of great splendour. The self is always a work in progress. It is a kind of wilderness which must be cultivated, mixed with one’s labour, before it can become meaningful. It is part of Puritan doctrine that human labour is what makes things real. Before we happened along, there was just chaos. Ceaseless activity is what keeps the world in existence. American optimism thus conceals a darker vision. It springs as much from a scepticism about material reality as from an affirmation of it. In themselves, Nature and the flesh are chaotic stuff. They are worthless until the spirit invests them with significance. It is labour that transforms Nature into meaning. And this always involves a degree of violence. Body and soul are both subject to belligerent onslaughts, along with rain forests and terrorist strongholds.

A lot of the West’s running, carving, slimming, stitching, puking and weight-pumping represents a fantasy of omnipotence, but also of immortality. It betrays a deep-seated hostility to the body, over which the immortal will must assert its sway. Because it is fragile, the body must be nurtured tenderly, yet it is just this fragility that makes you feel so squeamish about it. In the end, however, Nature always has the upper hand over culture. This victory is known as death. Death cannot be mastered, and is thus bound to be something of an indignity for those who wish the world to be magically responsive to their touch. There is nothing you can do with it. A corpse is just a lump of meaningless matter. Its meaning has haemorrhaged away.

Tragedy is the wager that you can make something out of this dissolution, plucking value from loss and breakdown. You can do so, however, only by staring these things squarely in the face. Only by submitting to their power can you transcend them. It is this that America finds hard to accept. In this as in other ways, it is a profoundly anti-tragic civilisation. On the whole, it rejects the belief, common to both St. Paul and Martin Heidegger, that you can make something of your life only by making something of your death.

Before the pioneers set out on their civilising mission, there was, so they imagined, simply wilderness. This wilderness was not entirely real, because it was yet to have meaning stamped upon it by the human will. Even so, America has always been nostalgic for this condition. In a world in which everything bears the indelible impress of Man, it is refreshing to escape from time to time from this wall-to-wall humanisation. Hence the American enthusiasm for national parks and outdoor activities. It is seductive to see the world as though we were not there to see it. We can always dream of perceiving things as they are in themselves, without the buzz and distortion of human meaning. We can take a vacation now and then from the intolerable burden of sense-making, rather as we do when we treat human flesh as something to be mindlessly indulged. We can shuck off language and confront reality in the raw, as we imagine an innocent child might do.

Man is what brings Nature to perfection, but he is also an intruder there. There is a strong streak of such primitivism in American culture. It is all the stronger because the wilderness was not that long ago, and because it still flourishes in the sublime rivers and mountain ranges of the country. It is worth adding, however, that though Nature in the United States is more dramatic and spectacular than most of the British countryside, it is not what one would call charming, as Cornish villages and the Yorkshire Dales are charming. Charm is more of a European quality than an American one. It is hard to be charming on a large scale, not least in a country where individual states dwarf entire European countries.

Yet there was also something ominous about this untamed landscape. It could be a place for spiritual reflection, or a refuge from a wicked world; but it was also an image of the brutish, anarchic self, which the early Puritans feared and sought to subdue. The wilderness could be seen as a barren waste land or spiritual darkness where the Devil lurked. Only through the sweated labour of men and women could anything decent and godly be made of it. Meaning and truth issue from the hand of Man. To make something intelligible is to draw it from the demon-ridden darkness into the sacred clearing illuminated by the light of reason. In subjugating the world in obedience to the word of Genesis, Man himself becomes a mini-Creator, conjuring order out of chaos. The belief that truth is a human creation, a popular doctrine in American philosophy, harks back to this vision. Without Man, the world withers.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who thought, incidentally, that America had less interest in philosophy than any other civilised nation, writes in proto-Marxist style of the conquest of Nature in early America. “The American people,” he remarks, “see themselves as marching through wildernesses, drying up marshes, diverting rivers, peopling the wilds, and subduing nature.” Yet the land, he argues, was not fertile enough to sustain a prosperous class of landlords alongside one of tenants, so there was no material basis in the country for an aristocracy. For that, you need large estates, not parcelled-out pieces of soil. He also points out that America’s encounter with the wilderness threw European history into reverse. Whereas Europeans evolved from so-called barbarism to civilisation, the early immigrants to America confronted a supposedly virgin Nature while themselves being “the product of eighteen centuries of labour and experience.”

As an immense region of untapped natural resources, America lay at the feet not of noble savages who would have been incapable of utilising it, but of educated, urban-bred, sophisticated men who plunged into its forests furnished with “Bible, axe, and newspapers.” The country, in short, was born of a felicitous time warp. For the newcomers, if not for the natives, it was the most fortunate conjuncture imaginable between the wild and the cultivated. What greater capitalist fantasy than that of an industrious people suddenly supplied with limitless natural resources to be exploited? It is the Robinson Crusoe myth on a spectacular scale. No wonder the nation was thought to be a work of Providence.

Anything Is Possible

Because of the all-powerful will, Americans are great believers in the fraudulent doctrine that you can do anything you want if you try hard enough. In no other country on earth does one hear this consoling lie chanted so often. If you want to fly to Rio and there is no airport to hand, simply want it as hard as you can and feathers will sprout spontaneously from your biceps. When the United States finally killed Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama declared with mathematical predictability that it was an example of how the country could do anything it set its mind to. He did not mention that ten years is a rather long time for the omnipotent will to creak into action. One wonders why the nation does not put its mind to abolishing poverty, if all of its mental strivings are guaranteed to succeed. The United States has a larger proportion of its population in prison, higher levels of mental illness, greater rates of teenage pregnancy, a lower level of child well-being, and higher levels of poverty and social exclusion than most other developed nations. Perhaps this is because its people have not been exercising their wills in concert. Perhaps a date and time should be appointed for, say, the willing away of criminal gangs, when great hordes of people can emerge civic-mindedly on to the streets and bend their collective mental efforts to this end.

The will is a modern substitute for the Almighty. Men and women can achieve great things by its power, but since to the puritan mind they are naturally given to devilish devices, this will come about only if they are constantly prodded, spurred on, mentored, exhorted, preached at and morally browbeaten. Otherwise they will lapse back into their natural-born turpitude. Hence the constant moralising, sermonising and cheer-leading of American society. It is no wonder that it venerates sports coaches as much as it does, given that they spend their time bawling at people to improve their performance.

It was a communal act of willing that brought America about in the first place. The nation itself is the work of the will. It is not just a country like any other, but a project, a vocation, a mission, a destiny, a spiritual enterprise. Nobody thinks this about Belgium. It is not the case with Wales, Slovenia or the United Arab Emirates, which some Americans might suspect is a movie company. Britain is not the work of the will. The British never planned their empire, for example. It just fell into their lap in a fit of absent-mindedness. They awoke one morning to find that they were governing India, even though nothing had been further from their thoughts. They did not particularly savour the prospect, but it seemed churlish not to get on with it.

Other countries just grew, while America was deliberately thought up. It is more like an automobile than an amoeba. It is unlike other nations not just because it is richer and has more jet fighters, but because it is less a chunk of land than a Platonic ideal. The United States has been called by God to be a model for other nations, which is to say that it is the very essence and paradigm of what nationhood is meant to be. It is not just a nation but
the
nation, rather as a Hoover is the very archetype of a vacuum cleaner. There are places in the world where patriot­ism has replaced religion, not least in the case of nationalist movements. In America, patriotism is a form of religion in itself, since it reveres one of God’s most precious creations, the nation.

Whether the country is strong and prosperous because it has been divinely chosen, or whether it was chosen because it was strong and prosperous, is not entirely clear. It was not because of their individual merit that the Jews were Yahweh’s favoured people. They were simply born into this chosen nation. The same is true of Americans. You do not normally choose to be an American, any more than you choose to be covered in freckles. It is not in that sense a matter of innate qualities. Yet it is hard to avoid the feeling that God chose the United States as his number one nation because he recognised its inherent merit, foreseeing that in the fullness of time its gross national product would be so impressive. Perhaps he is already turning his attention to China, India and Brazil, countries which as far as affluence goes seem to be rising rapidly in the most-favoured-people-under-God stakes. The Almighty may be a more fickle being than Americans suspect. It may be that the United States’s favoured-nation contract is running out, and that the Creator will be reluctant to renew it. It is also not clear whether countries need to have nuclear weapons to be acceptable in his sight, though it probably does no harm.