The Question of an American Culture
. . .I think it is quite ironic, and perhaps dangerous, and perhaps this nation is already suffering from the impact of that danger, that the United States of America is the most powerful country in the world and yet it claims to have no unifying culture. . .The natural response is for its citizens either to justify this irony by claiming that this discrepancy is what makes the country great (here great cannot mean powerful, since this was taken as a premise,) or to emphasize the importance of the few unifying properties that we have, which the development of our population makes seem to be mainly political.
Before going further, let me pose the following definition of the word “culture” for use in this essay. It is the common ground of mental positions held in a society, or a collective scheme. As this definition associates culture with meaning (mental position) we may expect that a society will have the urge to establish culture just as an individual will have the urge to establish meaning (from “Justiposition”). The premise of this country’s greatness (not international power) is an indication of the value of some quality which, in the character of the U.S. is appreciable (i.e. great), hence it points to the existence of a collective meaning, although in general, this greatness may refer to nothing but the value of pluralism, which would make the culture minimalist if that is as far as the greatness goes. (In other words, the metaphors of a melting pot or a tossed salad refer to cultural cliques rather than a universal culture, unless [at least] among all these subcultures there is a common appreciation of that pluralism, which is arguable.)
If this nation is to have more than a minimalist culture and at the same time allow for maximal cultural differences among its ethnic cliques, we still must have a very politically oriented culture. That is, most of our collective scheme will refer to the political nature of the nation, which we claim to be democracy. However, though our nation may be democratic, even if indirectly, this itself cannot be the substance of our culture, for the substance of culture, as defined, is like a type of meaning, and democracy is a type of government instead. What we would need in order to make democracy a basis for a culture is a meaning of democracy.
Suddenly this issue becomes a bit more than a reinforcement of common values when we realize how important to this basis of American culture is the answer to the question: “Does democracy have universal meaning?” or phrased in a more assuming, cynical way, “If democracy is the law of the people, why do so many people insist on breaking the law?” This latter form refers to the preliminary assumption that democracy does not weaken the law, but on the contrary allows for the social contract, the actuality of the law, to be stronger because it is a proper contract rather than an imposition.
Here I would like to introduce a second irony, that although the purpose of the wars of this nation in the Twentieth Century was to protect democracy, as Wilson claimed and others cheered after him, and although the U.S. military supposedly won those wars (with the exception of a war which people agreed had no credible purpose,) the U.S. lost democracy as a result of winning those wars.
The National rhetoric and propaganda supporting those military enterprises yielded the greatest possible distinction between democracy and authoritarianism and provided the connotation that the cardinal property of the latter was not external locus of authority, but the institution of authority itself. . .The justification for American foreign involvement shifted from the protection of its own democracy to the protection of the more vague concept, freedom (America’s own, in light of the red scares.) Hence recently, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr said on his radio program that residing in a country that defeated Iraq in 1991 granted him the freedom to pay cheap gas prices, and syndicated call-in host Rush Limbaugh warned that legislation against the use of a phone while driving indicated the restriction of our freedoms. I’m not sure that such things as the use of cell phones and buying cheap gas even comprise the domain of freedom, which in the U.S. Constitution refers to the denial of Congress the authority to separate itself from the direct concerns of the citizens. And it may be the case that such statements originate from a tendency to misconstrue the Supreme Court decision of Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) using the ninth Amendment to imply the freedom to do whatever one wants unless it intrude on the freedoms of others, rather than to reiterate and strengthen the fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
In either case, the meaning of democracy has dissolved into a concept of freedom, as one freedom with numerable manifestations or numerable freedoms with a unifying property or numerable freedoms without a unifying property. If it really is true that we define American culture in terms of these freedoms, we must meticulously investigate the nature of these freedoms, and the concept of freedom, or else discard them in favor of a more appropriate foundation of our culture, for I fear that an ignorance of this foundation or a lack of familiarity with what we claim to love so much will allow the further dissolution of our culture to the point at which we cling obsessively to a worthless concept, regardless of the nobility of its name.