04 July 2012

Know thyself

GK Chesterton, the great man of letters of the last century, said in his introduction to the Charles Dickens book ‘American Notes’:
This old Anglo-American quarrel was much more fundamentally friendly than most Anglo-American alliances. In Dickens's day each nation understood the other enough to argue. In our time neither nation understands itself even enough to quarrel. There was an English tradition, from Fox and eighteenth-century England; there was an American tradition from Franklin and eighteenth-century America; and they were still close enough together to discuss their differences with acrimony, perhaps, but with certain fundamental understandings. The eighteenth-century ... was an age, in short, in which the word “progress” could still be used reasonably; because the whole world looked to one way of escape and there was only one kind of progress under discussion. Now, of course, “progress” is a useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined direction; and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree.

Do not let us therefore be misled into any mistaken optimism or special self-congratulation upon what many people would call the improved relations between England and America. The relations are improved because America has finally become a foreign country. And with foreign countries all sane men take care to exchange a certain consideration and courtesy. But even as late as the time of Dickens’s first visit to the United States, we English still felt America as a colony; an insolent, offensive, and even unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony; a part of our civilisation, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I have said, under all its bounce and independence, really regarded us as a mother country. This being the case it was possible for us to quarrel, like kinsmen. Now we only bow and smile, like strangers.

The thing is worth reading in its entirety. My own worldview being as it is a haphazard mishmash of 18th-century classical conservatism, 19th-century Tractarianism and Christian socialism and 21st-century interpretations of the theories of EF Schumacher through Bill McKibben, John Cobb, Jr and Herman Daly, I still have a strong identification with an English-speaking culture, even as that culture is being disavowed to varying degrees (whether knowingly or out of ignorance) on both sides of the Atlantic.

So in the wake now of 4 July, the date when (according to British history) a group of terrorists and misguided political malcontents broke their ties to their closest benefactors and geopolitical guardians, or if you prefer, when (according to American history) a group of idealistic freedom fighters threw off a tyrannical monarchy to found a grand experimental Republic which would shape the world anew, it is worth asking ourselves what ideals of ‘progress’ we truly hold to. What sort of nation do we want to be? Where are our values? Where are our commitments? Where is our treasure stored? What we will do when our ‘bigness’, as renowned British biologist (and contemporary of Dickens, to boot) Thomas H Huxley once put it, no longer distracts us from ‘the great issue... and the terror of overhanging fate’, namely, ‘what are [we] going to do with all these things?’

Ultimately, to ask these things is to begin to ask what it means to be American.

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