Jere O’Neill SurberEurope’s America Today: A Little Help for
Our Friends?
Over the years, and in a variety of situations, I have heard
several of my European friends quote the same statement when the
question of prevailing attitudes toward our country arose (their
attribution of its source varied, so I’m not sure who originally
turned the phrase): "America is the only country that has gone
from barbarism to decadence without the detour through culture."
Though it has always struck me as a fair gloss of a common
European viewpoint, I’ve always wondered about some of its
underlying images and assumptions. For instance, was the
"barbarism" they had in mind something like the lawlessness of
the Old West, a sort of a Hobbesian state of nature, vividly
portrayed for several generations of German schoolboys in the
novels of Karl May? Or was it the fact that, to "civilized"
Europeans, early America was just "the other," that which they
were not? Was the "decadence" it envisions the kitsch
consumerism represented by Las Vegas or maybe, now, Wal-Mart? Or
did it indicate merely that we had somehow lost our focus or
self-confidence as a people? And should "culture" be spelled
with a lower- or upper-case "c"? Does it imply that the American
"melting-pot" failed to congeal into some identifiable culture,
or that we neglected to make our own distinctive contribution to
the "Cultural Inheritance" of the world?
The last time I heard this unflattering aphorism was back in
the early nineties. Perhaps now, in light of intervening events,
it seems dated to them, perhaps even too generous, and has
fallen into disuse. After all, one might feel that "barbarism"
fails to adequately convey the violence and degradation implicit
in the genocidal wars against the Native Americans, the legacy
of slavery, or the exploitation of immigrant labor. And the
accusation of "decadence" seems relatively mild in the face of
the numerous bellicose adventures pursued by the U.S. since the
Second World War.
Culture, however, is another matter entirely. Ironically, by
most accounts, the Europeans’ problem with us now is that
"American Culture" has imposed itself upon and largely displaced
any distinctively European Culture – especially so in light of
their earlier suggestion that we developed no distinctive
culture of our own. The French, for example, have particularly
smarted from our "hijacking" of the epicenter of the artworld
from Paris to New York in the fifties and, more recently, have
instituted programs to protect their native film industry from
Hollywood’s hegemony. I hardly need to mention the American
television and music industries as favorite recipients of
European cultural spleen.
In light of all this, I began to consider how one might
formulate a parallel dictum that would better reflect recent
shifts in the American mentalité and European attitudes
toward it. Although I haven’t yet run it by any of my
trans-Atlantic friends, I think that they might now accept
something like this: "America is the only country (at least in
recent history) that has gone from idealistic delusion to
paranoid aggression without the detour through reality." What
might be said on behalf of my suggestion?
To begin with, many of the most influential groups and
individuals involved in the founding of our country were, in
fact, self-declared idealists. From the seventeenth century
religious dissenters’ vision of the "City on the Hill," to
Jefferson’s secular view of an egalitarian nation of
citizen-landowners and independent artisans, to the New England
Transcendentalists’ dynamic organism of harmonious self-reliant
parts, to the various utopian experiments of the nineteenth
century, our beginnings were saturated with idealistic rhetoric
and conviction. So much so that it led even such an
arch-euro-centrist as Hegel to view America as his
westward-winging "Owl of Minerva’s" next landing zone, the place
where the weary idealism of Old Europe would be rejuvenated.
Of course, one would expect little argument from a
European over the fact that this was a deluded idealism. As a
graduate student in Europe in the seventies, I remember my
surprise at hearing my Continental colleagues recite details –
even specific names, dates, and events – regarding the American
slave trade and the genocide of Native Americans. They had
learned in primary school a history that had as yet made little
impact on my own early schooling, occurring, as it did, long
before the emergence of the curricular "culture wars" of the
eighties. In fact, I had grown up on the staple diet of "America
is the freest and best country in the world" (and, as a sometime
resident of Texas, that "Texas is the freest and best state in
America" to boot). That our present administration seems fully
to subscribe to both is ample testimony to the staying power of
this delusion.
The morphing of idealistic delusion into paranoid aggression
probably began in earnest with the Cold War, though fault lines
were already in evidence beginning with Reconstruction, the
closing of the American frontier, and, most clearly, the
economic disruptions of the Great Depression and its aftermath.
Still, it was the effects of the Cold War, epitomized internally
by Sen. McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts and externally by the
nuclear arms race, that were the first unmistakable symptoms of
the onset of aggressive paranoia. For their part, most
Europeans, by then ambivalent hosts to a massive occupational
force and often reluctant allies in its machinations, seemed to
feel the same range of emotions as anyone who has dealt with an
armed paranoiac. You certainly don’t want to offend him, in
certain limited situations you might actually be safer with him
than without him, but you can’t ever feel entirely comfortable
in his presence.
There is abundant clinical evidence to suggest that paranoia
is a relatively fixed psychic structure, though quite capable of
expanding, transmuting, or substituting the immediate objects of
its fear and aggression. It can also enter a period of latency
when its original object has been eliminated, only to reemerge,
sometimes in an even more delusional and virulent form, when
provoked by a "trigger event." It would not be too much of a
reach to suggest that this is exactly what happened after the
collapse of Soviet Communism, followed by the events of 9/11.
That so many of the architects and executioners of our current
Middle-Eastern policy were former Cold Warriors seems to confirm
this diagnosis.
What, then, was "the detour through reality" that we missed?
Most Europeans are well aware of their own country’s colonial
heritage and of the usually slow, painful process of its
disintegration. How could they not be? In central London, for
instance, it is difficult to walk for more than a few minutes
without passing a monument to British troops fallen in some
remote corner of the earth, now liberated from its imperial
orbit for many decades. And one encounters the occasional
Frenchman who feels that handing over their problems in
Southeast Asia to the Yanks was a "petit revenge" for the
postwar American cultural imperialism inflicted on France.
Germans and Italians, of course, were forced to face the reality
of utter defeat in its most unconditional form. Whether due to
loss of empire or decisive military defeat, and hopes of renewed
glory pinned on the more recent experiment of the European Union
notwithstanding, European nations have, for the most part, found
names for their "real," put aside their colonialist delusions,
and embraced their role as members of a broader world community.
If a trace of past delusions resurrects itself from time to
time, like the Neo-Nazis in Germany or Le Pen’s radical Right in
France, Europeans now seem to have a firm enough grip on reality
to see these for what they are and react accordingly.
Perhaps, then, there is a dark side to the old optimistic
doctrine of American exceptionalism. Just as the singularities
of our geography and our natural and human resources permitted
us to sustain our idealistic illusions well beyond any point
warranted by the realities of our situation, so they may also
have conspired in barring us from the therapeutic embrace of our
own natural and historical limitations, thus allowing one
delusional state to morph seamlessly into a far more dangerous
one…like the chronic alcoholic who is instantly "cured" by
joining an apocalyptic religious cult without first traversing
the "Twelve Steps," one is tempted to allegorize.
But American exceptionalism, even if granted the limited
validity implied in my proposed dictum, cannot be the entire
explanation. As certain European "postmodern" critics have been
especially keen in pointing out, America is also the main
factory in which the modern machinery of self-delusion was first
forged. It was during the time between the closing of the
frontier and end of the Depression, a period when we might have
commenced an encounter with reality as the European nations did
in the wake the First World War, that witnessed the rise of the
American corporate media conglomerates, epitomized worldwide by
the word "Hollywood." In many ways, our "dream-machine" worked
like a mis-prescribed drug, intensifying the very symptoms that
might otherwise have been cured through an effective encounter
with the "real." Unfortunately for us, further "treatment"
involved the prescription of ever more powerful drugs, first in
the form of television, now in digital packages, to the point
where our aggressive paranoia has become so chronic that the
primitive "duck and cover" delusions of the Cold War have given
way to entire umbrellas of military and bureaucratic machinery
(think "Star Wars" and "The Department of Homeland Security").
What, then, is the chance that our own "detour through
reality" will yet occur? Might it happen gradually, as it slowly
dawns upon us that we simply do not have the resources to
continue costly bellicose adventures in the face of a declining
economy? Will it involve some sudden assault that would make the
collapse of the Twin Towers seem merely a minor diversion in
comparison? Or do we yet have the fortitude to stop our
self-medicating, admit that we are afflicted, and then seek
assistance, perhaps from those who have already been through the
therapeutic procedure…perhaps even from our European friends?
During a college travel course in Europe not long ago, a
member of my group encountered several French students in a cafe
who expressed some strong anti-American sentiments. It was her
first inkling that others, especially young persons her own age,
might not share her own terminally optimistic view of her
country. Later, after an emotional and sometimes tearful
conversation with me about this, she finally concluded, "I just
wish that, like, when I traveled and someone asked me where I
was from and I said, ‘America,’ they would say, ‘Oh, isn’t that,
like, that nice country just south of Canada?" OK, it’s hardly a
blueprint for the future, but somehow I thought that she was on
the right track; somehow she had begun her own therapeutic
process.
Jere O'Neill Surber is Professor of Philosophy and
Cultural Theory at the University of Denver. He has logged
many years abroad, mostly in Europe, studying, teaching, and
leading student travel groups. He is the author of five
books and over fifty papers, chapters, and reviews on modern
European philosophy and culture. |
