Arts & Letters Daily links to this article by Leo Marx in the Boston Review. Here are its first two paragraphs [their italics in our bold]:
When I was teaching in England in 1957, Richard Hoggart, a founder of the British school of cultural criticism, told me about having met a young Fulbright scholar who identified himself as a teacher of something called “American studies.” “And what is that?” Hoggart asked. An exciting new field of interdisciplinary teaching and research, he was told. “But what is new about that?” It combines the study of history and literature. “In England we’ve been doing that for a long time,” Hoggart protested. “Yes,” said the eager Americanist, “but we look at American society as a whole – the entire culture, at all levels, high and low.” Hoggart, who was about to publish The Uses of Literacy, his groundbreaking study of British working-class culture, remained unimpressed. After a moment, in a fit of exasperation, his informant blurted out: “But you don’t understand, I believe in America!”
“That was it!” Hoggart said to me, “then I did understand.” It was unimaginable, he dryly added, that a British scholar would ever be heard saying, “I believe in Britain.”
Of course it could just be coincidence, but I reckon this contrast does illustrate rather nicely the power of academic ideas.
Britain is now ruled by an elite which is busily breaking it into fragments and melting them into the European Union. I’m not saying that this is necessarily as terrible an idea as some writers here think it is (although personally I think it’s a pretty bad one), but it is nevertheless beyond denial that this is what they are doing.
The USA, on the other hand, is still very much together.
Granted, in 1957 there was a lot less Britain to believe in than there was, or still is, USA, but still …
On the other hand, I dare say that “American Studies” perhaps now means something rather different to what it meant in 1957.
He’s clearly onto something there. The American “idea” is what binds us together. The Constitution is the sacred text of that idea. It’s almost holy writ over here. Just look at the HUGE debate over whether money=speech. It’s the basis of all we hold true.
I work with a Ghanian. He’s lived in France and Britian. He still visits both regularly. He keeps telling me the US is unique in ways you can’t understand until you leave – or until you come here to live. One of his favorite lines is, “If the United States didn’t exist, humanity would need to invent it.”
Still, I’ve always been envious of more homogenous societies. They strike me as being more close knit, more of a community, more at ease among each other.
I often wonder if it would be possible to meld the closeness and homogenaity of other nations with the economic and political freedom of the US.
Now there’s another contrast of perspectives. Michael Hiteshaw assumes other countries are closer and more homogeneous. But regardless of the size and physical variety of its continent, culturally, modern America seems remarkably homogeneous to people from older countries. (Though still not nearly homogeneous enough to be studied as one thing.)
That’s how I take (and share) Hoggart’s incomprehension. Many Britons find it is difficult to give very much meaning to Britishness, because we are aware that there is very little that all British people have in common. We have a lot of sense of the locality and the divisions in our culture. It is a little easier to think of oneself as a Scot, a Glaswegian, an Englishman, a Northerner, a Yorkshireman, than it is of being a Briton. Our identities are nested in a different order from Americans, who identify being American as the key factor.
The American national myth is constantly and actively promoted by US institutions. To a Briton it looks fearful. As if they don’t know who they are unless they constantly repeat it to themselves–and even then can’t quite believe it. The insistence on difference (from the rest of the world) acting as reinforcement of conformity within, is reminiscent of the inanities of nihonjinron.
The idea of a pledge of allegiance in British schools is not so much unthinkable as laughable. The only people able to take it seriously would be the objectors and refuseniks.
And yet there is something unique and ubiquitous about us Americans. I once heard a black American remark that the ‘Back to Africa’ activists could wear their dashikis and their beads, become fluent in various Africa languages and still, once they were in Africa, would stand out as Americans. He then said that he knew first generation Chinese-extraction Americans who returned to China or Taiwan and stood out – as Americans. You probably know a few Britons who have been over here for a few years and have gone native. It will show. In fact, a lot of the British bloggers on Samizdata sound as if they may be getting a slight infection from time to time.
Whatever it is – an attitude? an outlook? the set of the shoulders? – is probably more evident to you than it is to us. But it undeniably exists.
After having gone back and read the article, I have to conclude that Leo Marx and the rest of the Americanists he talks about know a great deal about an academic subculture that is closer to European thought than it is to America. His older “BD Americanists”, with their talk of an American spirit sound like warmed over Hegelians with the requisite dash of Marxism (not Leo). They remind me of Emerson, with his correspondence with Karl Marx and his raging anti-semitism. American by circumstance but oh so central European.
The younger After Divide Americanists are the same bunch of historically provincial navel gazers that have turned much of the high cultural thought in this country into sterile nilhism. The poor things were so traumatized by the Vietnam War. It shook their faith in the ‘American Idea’. That couldn’t possibly have happened to anyone before they came along. Alongside their anguish, what happened to southerners in 1861 is as nothing. Pah.
95% of what is really happening as America evolves is in the similarities between all the fragments and subcultures that they appear to care so little about. Their emphasis on the fragmentation and differences blinds them to the commonalities that matter. Obviously, there are many different groups in this country. Given the polyglot nature of our genesis, the observation that there are differences is a triviality. When they deliberately ignore what there is among us in common, they reject their only logical subject matter.
For example a large and growing central Hispanic segment is developing in our population. These learned men will concentrate on studying the central American and Spanish aspects of that segment. The significant subject is that segment’s change through time as they live here. embracing not the “universal, egalitarian values of the Enlightenment” that these academics claim undergird America (a sort of anglicized Liberte’ Egalite’ Fraternite’), but the more realistic ideas of Locke and Smith, with the practical application that people like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson, and perhaps even Edmund Burke, gave to them. I predict that the interesting and significant thing about the Hispanic assimilation will be that they will adhere to these ideas without ever hearing about any of these -to them- alien thinkers. After all, the rest of us only know of a few of them and then largely as just names. Yet most of us, outside of academe anyway, accept their concepts as our own.
Doug Collins, I lived in Texas for 16 years, and everyone who meets me in Britain, France or SE Asia says, “What part of the US are you from?” I don’t think it’s the accent, although it may be partly that, but I don’t think I have an American accent; maybe transatlantic, though. I do also think it’s the cut of the jib. The air of confidence and lack of chippiness. And the open goodwill to people one meets casually, with the accompanying assumption that those people will be equally friendly towards me. It’s interesting.
Verity,
Couldn’t agree more. I always felt that the American national culture, or ethos, – such as it is – is as different from European culture, as European culture is from say, Japanese.
To distill this thought even further, it all comes down to attitude.
That American society is so much ‘younger’, (newer), than others, could also have something to do with the fresh, positive, upbeat feeling in the US.
The American national myth is constantly and actively promoted by US institutions. To a Briton it looks fearful.
We actually have the opposite view of European ennui towards their nations and cultures. We find it distasteful. You seem like spoiled children who sneer at their parents hard work and sacrifice; at their accomplishments. To us, you seem to have no appreciation for what was left to you. How could a Briton NOT take pride in all the UK has done; all they have given to the world and to Britons in particular. To you, this attitude must seem sophisticated. To us, it appears tragic.
How is it you can have monstrous demonstrations villifying George Bush and Tony Blair over the war in Iraq, a transient event for most Brits at best; yet hand the UK over to the European Union, under a constitution written by a Frenchman which you’ve propbably never read, all without a whimper of protest?
Explain THOSE priorities to a “conformist” American, if you can. Who’s the conformist here? Who’re the mindless robots?
Ernest Young – Yes, but more. I wouldn’t necessarily say the vigour of American love of their country comes from being ‘newer’ necessarily.
I know I will be vilified for this, but I think there was a gene exodus to America. The strong, imaginative and hopeful took the terrible chance of crossing a vast ocean, getting sick in steerage from foetid air and maybe dying on board but, if fate smiled on them, landing three months later in a new land with their optimism, if not money, intact in their pockets. And they made the best of it, to the point where they lead the world, including sickly, dying Europe, today.
Later waves of Irish, Jews and Italians gave America its lavish canvas, which is so beyond rich that Europe cannot stand it. Who else hates America, these days, except Europe? Not SE Asia. Not China. Not India. Not S America. Just the Europeans who were left behind.
I never really researched it, but I always wondered where the academic self-loathing that is so fashionable in western countries came from. Mad reaction and guilt complex from the colonial times, when feelings of superiority were accepted as a matter of course, combined with snobbery and the urge to contradict and lecture the working class ?
Living in Europe is similar to living in a very old house, parts of which are broken, and beyond repair, and parts that have been repaired – but badly. A house in which nothing is ever thrown away, but where much is discarded. A house that is so cramped to live in that when any major movement is made to improve conditions, all you get is a suffocating fog of dust.
A house where the neighbours have moved into the basement, and refuse to leave, but continue to root through the cupboards and storerooms in the hope of finding something, anything of value. The only people to move out are those who are, or have been, prepared to leave behind the useless baggage of the past, taking with them only the ideas that have proved to be of value.
The most valuable of these ideas (among others), are those of personal freedom and responsibilty, and it is these very ideas that are at the basis of the United States of America.
Continuing with the ‘house’ analogy, the US is the ‘new house’, and is naturally quite different from the ‘old house’. Better in some ways, but not all, the feeling of freedom is still fresh, and quite exhilarating, and inspiring. This feeling, unhampered by hidebound mores and traditions, does sometimes go ‘OTT’, but it is, as yet, not polluted by that strain of evil, created by alliances and allegances, which found root in Europe during the Middle Ages, and which are the cause of many of Europe’s problems to this day.
Like all newbys, they are of course, very proud of their ‘new house’. Long may they have that pride, and may it encourage the owners of the ‘Old House’ to ‘dump the junk’, and get on with a remodelling project of which they in turn may feel proud.
No, I do not see the present idea of the EU as being the remodel of choice, too shoddy a job, one might say it was ‘jerry’ built, but somewhere in the future the ideas of personal freedom may catch-on, and the ‘old house’ will once again be a source of pride and affection.
That was brilliantly written, Ernest.
“How could a Briton NOT take pride in all the UK has done; all they have given to the world and to Britons in particular.”
Well, we do; but drawing attention to the fact our ancestors did it, when that is obvious and well known, is regarded as vulgar.
How is it you can have monstrous demonstrations villifying George Bush and Tony Blair over the war in Iraq, a transient event for most Brits at best;
Search me, though “monstrous” is not the word I would use. “Idiotic” or “confused” more like. Note that how much protests were personally directed at Bush and Blair, however.
[…] yet hand the UK over to the European Union, under a constitution written by a Frenchman which you’ve propbably never read, all without a whimper of protest?
Again search me, and include me out! But I think you may have indirectly thrown light on the disconnection again.
“We” British don’t talk about ourselves as a having a collective personality or as doing things as “us” in quite the same way that Americans do. We are connected to our country, but the actions of the state are impersonal. The state and the government are a formless “Them” in modern British parlance: “They ought to do something about it.” Exchanging one Them for another isn’t so big a deal.
FYI: most Britons may have heard of the EU Constitution, but most know nothing whatsoever of its content, and are unlikely ever to read it. (It is a tedious and unprofitable task, in any case. If you don’t have considerable background in EU affairs, you have little chance of understanding it.)
“How could a Briton NOT take pride in all the UK has done; all they have given to the world and to Britons in particular.”
Well, all the good stuff was done a long time ago, and like boxers and salesmen, – you are only as good as your last fight or sale.
Having done so well in the past, we expect nothing short of excellence now. Hence the lack of pride in what we now have, and in the lack of any recent achievment. No, a World Cup victory every fifty years really doesn’t cut it.
Compared to our Leaders and heroes over the past three hundred years, the present bunch are just a bunch of bureaucratic dross. Could you viably compare Blair with the likes of Churchill or Disraeli?, or any of our current ‘heroes’, (Beckham, Jagger, Elton John, or the latesst flavour of ‘cool’), with the likes of ‘real’ heroes, such as Wellington, Nelson or ‘The Few’, or any of the numerous ‘unsung’ present day heroes, which we don’t get to hear about because they are not ‘fashionable’.
We are proud of our past, but at best, non-commital about our present. We all know we can do a lot better….
Being English, we expect nothing but the best from our Leaders, anything less just wont do, and gets treated without that other English trait – utter disdain.
Sorry, last para should read:
Being English, we expect nothing but the best from our Leaders, anything less just wont do, and gets treated with that other English trait – utter disdain.
The state and the government are a formless “Them” in modern British parlance: “They ought to do something about it.”
What about, “We should do something about it.” It’s YOUR government. It’s YOUR society. It’s YOUR future. Not someone elses. What utter helplessness.
most Britons may have heard of the EU Constitution, but most know nothing whatsoever of its content, and are unlikely ever to read it. (It is a tedious and unprofitable task, in any case. If you don’t have considerable background in EU affairs, you have little chance of understanding it.)
What a pathetic abdication. It’s too hard! I’m not smart enough! There’re big words in there!! Your children are going to be bound by those laws. Your life is going to be framed within them. Isn’t there any discussion of how it’s all supposed to work? Aren’t there any British think-tanks broadcasting forums, moderating discussions, holding debates on this? Where’re all the literate, well read Brits we all know and love (or despise, depending on their viewpoint)?
Why not start dragging all those law professors out of the University and get them to contribute something to the wider understanding of What it all means? Where’re are the historians among you? Why aren’t MPs discussing this? Why isn’t anyone talking about this?
How can you just sign up to all this without knowing what it is, what it means, what it WILL mean for all of you??
Michael
Calm down, and stop insulting one of the many groups of people in Europe who are doing everything they can to put a spoke in the wheel of the EU. We have built a group blog which gets five thousand odd hits per day and has a commentariat that is the envy of the blogosphere, and together we insult the EU relentlessly, and get people to think straighter about it, just about every chance we get. We ARE “doing something about it”.
There has been a lot of discussion of these issues over here. It’s simply that this is a very difficult argument to win. Too many people favour the opposite point of view to ours, and too many people don’t care about it and prefer to think of other things. And because we write about other things besides the iniquities of the EU, we reach a lot more people with that message than we would if that was all we ever said.
You come over like an impatient incompetent of the kind who is heard bellowing on the fringes of all political efforts, to the effect that: this is not good enough!! We should be doing ten times as well as we are, and it’s all the fault of the people who are doing something but not enough!! Blah blah.
Maybe you’re trying to help, but it doesn’t sound like it.
Brian,
If I sound OTT, I apologize. I certainly wasn’t my intent to insult anyone. Shake up the complancency, yes. Insult? No.
An impatient incompetent? Hmmmm. Perhaps I am incompetent. But I try. I care. I work at changing things. I’m a member of the American Enterprise Institute, The Council on Foriegn Relations, and I correspond regularly with my representatives. I literally got a letter yesterday from Senator Sarbanes responding to my concerns about the money in Commanders Emergency Response Fund running out in Iraq. It has been restored, he said. So in my incompetent way, I’m making a tiny impact. But a tiny, incompetent impact where it matters.
You can too, is all I’m trying to say.
As an aside, before people wax altogether too fulsomely over the high quality genetic material that comprised the Colonies, I have to add that a considerable portion of America was made up of criminals. 🙂
We’re not just the religious fanatics looking for a place where we can be seriously wierd. No. We’re also malcontents, murderers, pimps, prostitutes, smugglers and any sort of flotsam hanging around in a prison cell prior to a good hanging.
Just like Australia was used as a dumping spot for Britain’s criminals, America was also used in this way by nearly every European country. I’m not boasting about this mind you but I am highly amused by it. If you had a full prison and didn’t want to bother executing people, then ship them to America. Worked for everyone involved I’d say.
Perhaps that explains why we’re so sensitive about partial nudity in public. On the one hand we’re opposed to it due to our religious origins. On the other hand we’re trying to get a good look due to our criminal origins. Might explain New Orleans.
🙂
“Well, all the good stuff was done a long time ago, and like boxers and salesmen, – you are only as good as your last fight or sale.”
Like Darwin and Goose Green?
But the preferred British method seems to be to muddle through and only win the last battle. I wonder what the Iron Duke would do about the EU. I think the UK muddled through the EU thing admirably, allowing the Spanish and Poles the public honor of putting the nails in the coffin.
And if we look at world military powers who is #2? Who do the French go to when they need an aircraft carrier that works? Who still has a Commonwealth that can tell a third world dictator/thug he is out of line?
Finally, please cut Mr. Hiteshew some slack. Having Mr. Sarbanes for a Senator is a great cross to bear, even if he did attend Oxford like our last president.