Across the Pond (11 page)

The Perils of Idealism

Ideals are what the will aims at, and the United States is an idealist nation in a double sense of the word. It is strongly committed to certain lofty goals, and it is idealist in the philosophical sense of believing that the mind creates reality. There is a connection between the two, since if you pitch your ideals as high as America does, you will need nothing short of an all-powerful mind to achieve them. The former kind of idealism is commendable but also cruel. Men and women need goals to aim at; but if these ideals are unrealistic, all they will do is rub their noses in their failure to attain them. The result will be self-hatred and abysmally low self-esteem. There is something terroristic about such idealism, as there is something terroristic for Freud about the superego. For Freud, the superego is not only vindictive but obtuse. It punishes us with obscene delight for falling short of ideals it should know we cannot achieve.

The enemy of the superego is comedy, which accepts our frailty and deficiency with a wry shrug. It converts feeling bad about ourselves into laughing at ourselves, which is not the most popular of American pursuits. We are indeed defective, but this is in the nature of things. It is also bound up with what is precious about us. The spirit of comedy is the spirit of forgiveness. Impurity is to be relished as well as put right, whereas the puritan mind refuses to accept anything less than perfection. This is one reason why it is so allergic to the material, a messy phenomenon which can never be wholly mastered by an idea. It will always come seeping out over the edges of our schemes, like some ghastly piece of ectoplasm.

It is tragedy, not comedy, which holds that the truth about men and women stands revealed only when you purge them of their everyday habits and press them to an extreme. This, too, is a typically American article of faith, though without the tragic implications. Real human beings are those who push themselves to a limit. You will know who you really are only when you are up against the wall. Life is a race, a trial, a competition, a set of hurdles, and to succeed in it you must be constantly on your toes, in moral training, perpetually at your best. To march on the spot is to fall behind.

That the superego is so implacable is why St. Paul thinks that the Law is cursed. It can only show us where we go wrong, not inspire us to do right. Those who languish in the grip of excessive idealism risk falling ill of it. They are the slaves of a particularly brutal master. Human beings, Freud remarked, are both more and less moral than they think they are. If they are too neurotic about morality, they will be less moral in a more important sense of the term, less able to live a richly self-fulfilling existence. If the United States could be a little less moral, it would be greatly to its advantage. In fact, the nation might become more moral by being less so. It is partly because the country is so much in the grip of certain high-minded doctrines that it sometimes behaves so shabbily. It is ready to sacrifice the lives of small children in foreign lands to its own spiritual certainties.

What is negative, then, is whatever stands in the way of the will. And this, as we have seen, includes the amorphous matter that the will seeks to reduce to order. This is why one of the most materialistic civilisations on earth harbours a secret hostility to the material. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of that quintessentially American creed, Christian Science, thought the material world was an illusion. Many Americans are in this sense natural-born Buddhists. Yet the doctrine of mind over matter, which accounts for so much in American culture, is strangely self-refuting. It sees the mind as independent of material circumstance, but fails to recognise that this belief is itself shaped by material conditions. From the Pilgrim Fathers to Pepsi-Cola, America has had good material reasons for moulding the earth to its desires. It is not, of course, the only nation to have done so. Mastering Nature is a necessity for any civilisation, whatever the more dewy-eyed kind of eco-warrior might think. Unless we build some sea walls pretty quickly, Bangladesh may be lost without a trace in some years’ time, along with a lot of other places. Diabetics who inject themselves with insulin are seeking to overpower a Nature that has spun out of control. So are engineers who lord it arrogantly over the natural world by building bridges to stop people from drowning. When it comes to blowing up meteors about to strike the earth, a spot of civilised violence does nobody any harm.

Yet violence is not always in the cause of civility. Freud acknowledged that Eros, builder of cities, involves a good deal of aggression. But he also thought that this violence could easily get out of hand. Lurking inside the drive to create and construct was his old enemy Thanatos, or the death drive. The very forces that make for civilisation can also reduce it to chaos and barbarism. Freud would thus have had no problem in understanding what happened not long ago in Iraq, as well as in many other spots where the American eagle has landed and unsheathed its claws. To save the world, you may have to destroy it.

Weak Flesh and Willing Spirits

The world-crushing will is part of America’s Puritan legacy. Yet if the United States is such a puritanical nation, how come there are so many strip joints around? What is one to make of a county in which clubs and bars stay open all night while people go to bed at 9 p.m.? This is not as contradictory as it appears. For one thing, revelling in the flesh is simply the flipside of the disembodied will. Those who are hostile to the body can see it only as a source of mindless sensation. Pole dancers and prostitutes are bodies stripped of meaning and value, reduced to brute materiality. People who pour booze into themselves all night long see their flesh simply as a convenient container. This is logical enough if one regards material things not as meaningful in themselves, but as imbued with meaning only by the human will.

For another thing, bare flesh is big business, and to the puritan mind making profit can be a sign of God’s favour. It may be that when the Creator urged us to make use of our worldly talents, he did not exactly have pole dancing in mind. Even so, prospering on earth may be a foretaste of flourishing in heaven. This, as it happens, is not the case for the New Testament, which tells us in traditional Judaic spirit that we shall know God for who he is when we see the poor being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. The only problem is that those who seek to act on this information might end up with a bullet through the head. This is not a problem over which Mormons and right-wing Evangelicals in the States lose an excessive amount of sleep.

The idea that the flesh is just meaningless matter is a peculiarly modern one. For an older style of thought, the human body is inherently meaningful. In fact, human meaning is in the first place carnal meaning. To watch a small child reaching for a toy even before it can speak is to see this in action. The meaning is inherent in the physical gesture, like the lining in a glove. On this view, the world, which includes our bodies, is significantly organised. It is true that this built-in significance will come to fruition only when we give it voice. The creative human word is an essential part of how things become themselves. But it is not just an arbitrary imposition on them. It must respect the inherent natures of things. It cannot just make what it likes of them, rather as humanity cannot make what it likes of itself.

Among other things, this is because we do not own ourselves, as some modern thinkers seem to imagine. I can use my Victorian paperweight as a door-stopper, but I cannot make what I like of my passions and desires. My body is not my property. There may be some good arguments for abortion, but the belief that the body is one’s private possession is not one of them. For one thing, I can give my property away, but I cannot give my body away. I do not have a pain in the same sense that I have a chain saw. I am not monarch of my own flesh. On the contrary, it is my body, derived as it is from the bodies of others, which proclaims how dependent I am on creatures of my kind. To try to shuck off the body—to regard it as no part of one’s real self—is to deny this dependence in the name of an ethic of self-ownership.

If the body is offensive to this ethic, it is because it represents the “outside” of oneself that one can never fully master. At some point in the future, it is going to give up on me whether I like it or not. In this sense, the cosmetic surgeons are playing a losing game. The American dream of immortality sounds like the fantasy of those so deeply in love with life that they cannot bear to relinquish it. In fact, it reflects a virulent hostility to human existence, which is always perishable, incarnate existence. Those who have their sights fixed on earthly immortality are unable to live in the present, and so, ironically, have less to lose from dying than those who can live in the here and now.

American society, as opposed to individual Americans, behaves as though it will never die, and to this extent lives in bad faith. Death is a true satirist, a great deflater and debunker. It cuts us down to our true size. Perhaps all bankers, generals, politicians and corporate executives should be required to undergo near-death experiences in controlled laboratory conditions. It would transform their lives far more thoroughly than any number of courses in packaged Kabala, cut-price Sufism, off-the-peg mysticism, or ready-to-serve transcendentalism. In the case of the more unsavoury bankers and politicians, one might arrange for the experiment to be a little less controlled than it might otherwise be.

The will was not always thought of as a dominative force. For some thinkers in pre-modern times, it is a kind of spontaneous attraction to what is good. It is really a kind of love. For Thomas Aquinas, it means that our bodies have a built-in bias towards the good, which suggests that we are not free to choose whatever ends we like. It is as though some of our ends are chosen for us already, simply by virtue of the kind of creatures we are. We are naturally inclined to happiness and well-being. Far from being a despotic power, the will on this view is a question of one’s deepest desires, which are always at root a desire for the good. We can, of course, be spectacularly wrong about what the good consists in, but we cannot not will it.

Since we do not always know what the good consists in, or what our real desires are, the will is not just a question of conscious decision. It cannot be reduced to the callow postmodern cult of “options.” To speak of the will of God is not to suggest that the Almighty has a dazzling range of possibilities at his disposal, like a shopper faced with a bewildering array of exotic fruits. God cannot will whatever he pleases. He cannot will evil or sickness. If the will is bound up with our deepest wants and needs, it is not as free as the modern age imagines, any more than our desires are entirely free. One does not choose to desire forgiveness or a grand piano. For Aquinas, a truly free will is not one that can will whatever takes its fancy. It is one that is free from the perversity that drives us to desire what is destructive. The will is not to be seen as boundless and disembodied. It is as finite as a coffee spoon and as fallible as the pope.

There is a sense in which American materialism is a highly spiritual affair. Because the will to possess aspires to infinity, it has all the disdain for material things of a monk or a hippie. It hankers after tangible goods, while being in itself unworldly and austere. This is one reason why it can be reconciled so easily with religion. It is not just hypocrisy for a chief executive to fire two thousand employees and then read a lesson in church on the blessedness of the poor. As a form of infinity, the will that drives the system is on terms with the Almighty. It is an image of him on earth. It is just as bodiless as he is. God transcends the universe as a whole, while the drive to acquire transcends any specific bit of it. The closest thing to not needing anything, which is the enviable condition of God, is not needing something but needing everything.

Desire does not rest easy with the present and particular, since there is an endless future to be won. Capitalism has worked wonders, as Karl Marx never ceased to insist, but there is one achievement that must forever elude it: the ability, as D. H. Lawrence put it, “to live on the spot where we are.” Will or desire is radically homeless. The manic will of Captain Ahab in
Moby-Dick
is an utterly unearthly force. Like all infinite things, it is terrifying and annihilating. It can come to rest only in the unattainable Otherness which the white whale signifies. And to do so it will clamber over the whole of Creation.

FOUR

America the Dutiful

A Very Fine American

Unlike Americans, the British are a notoriously godless bunch. They treat their religion rather like alcohol. It is when religious faith starts to interfere with one’s everyday life that it is time to give it up. The odd weekly drinking session, like the weekly visit to church, does nobody any harm, but bingeing on the Almighty is as bad for your health as getting smashed on vodka. God is a splendid chap, but there is no point in letting him go to your head. Brood on him too long and before you know where you are you will be breaking down bedroom doors and dragging adulterers out of each other’s arms. It is imprudent to take things to extremes. Religious faith may have caused Jesus to be crucified, but that was in another country, and a long time ago. One should find a way of worshipping him which is compatible with support for the monarchy and the odd luxury cruise in the Mediterranean.

Elsewhere in the Western world, sport has largely replaced religion as a weekly ceremony in which ordinary men and women worship superior beings. In the States, the two forms of liturgy continue to exist side by side. If sport is so vital to American life, it is because it writes large the qualities most valued in everyday existence: strength, heroism, glamour, spectacle, self-discipline, stamina, recklessness, a winning spirit, a consuming desire for wealth, and ferocious competitiveness. It is as though it incarnates the very essence of American life, rather as a man with a beret, an accordion and a string of onions round his neck signifies Frenchness. I was once crossing the campus of a university famous for its football team when I was suddenly assailed by a small posse of security guards, who held me back as though I were an enraged crowd about to storm an embassy. On a signal from one of the guards, a line of football players, each one a precious commodity on legs as thick as tree trunks, plodded slowly from one field to another and disappeared from view. I was then allowed to proceed. Americans are religious about sport, and in this are like many other nations. Most other nations, however, are less religious about religion.

In the United States, Christianity needs to be sanitised, modernised, de-Judaised and Americanised, a project which is known among other things as the Mormon Church. The scandal that Jesus was a scruffy, unhygienic Jew from a part of the globe sorely bereft of bath tubs and chocolate chip cookies must somehow be rectified. So must the fact that he is even more remote from us in time than Gary Cooper. His message must be streamlined and updated, translated into the mission statements of business schools. Such schools usually run courses on business ethics, a subject which a cynical observer might regard as falling into the same category as research into unicorns. In a world of swindling financiers and chief executive gangsters, there is a sense in which Centers for Business Ethics are urgently necessary. One might also argue that they make about as much sense as an Institute for the Advanced Study of Elves.

God is a very fine American because he is such a fantastic success. He knows everything, can do anything, can hire and fire his underlings as the fancy takes him, and despite being omnipotent is admirably upright. This is a rare enough combination on earth, where power and virtue tend to be in inverse proportion to each other. There could be no better role model for an aspiring entrepreneur. God is not dependent on anyone else, and as such is a kind of cosmic advertisement for American individualism. He is unbelievably enormous and powerful and so is the United States, which makes it logical that he should have a special place for the country in his heart.

It is true that the Creator’s best-known product, the universe, leaves something to be desired. It is widely acknowledged to be riddled with some alarming flaws and defects, and might well benefit from being taken back to the drawing board. Perhaps the project was overambitious. All the same, you have to hand it to someone who can manufacture such a stupendous product so cheaply, using no materials whatsoever. You can even share in the Lord’s success, rather as you can buy shares in Walmart. This is known as grace. The Supreme Being is also remarkable for having cornered the market in universes, at least as far as we know. Certainly no other such product has appeared so far.

Given all this, it is not hard to see why religion and political ideology in the States can be so beautifully blended. Much of the former is simply the latter in thin disguise. It is true that God does not seem to have passed on his success ethic to his immediate family. His son hung out with losers, crooks and whores, and never did a decent day’s work in his life. If there had been state handouts in first-century Palestine, he would probably have been first in line to grab them. One can easily picture him as a union agitator, demagogically organising Galilean carpenters. He also probably supported socialised medicine. No doubt it became painfully clear to his distraught parents that he lacked a winning attitude. He refused to settle down, father a number of beautiful, supremely talented children, and contribute to society as an upright citizen. Instead, he denounced the rich, was deserted by his companions, and tortured and murdered by the imperial state. He warned his comrades that if they were true to his word, they, too, would find themselves on death row. Those who did not get themselves executed were simply not trying hard enough. It is true that Jesus is believed to have risen from the dead, which is more than can be said for Michael Jackson, so far at least. But the fact remains that he was scarcely a shining success while he was alive, and according to some Biblical scholars might well have transferred his mission to Jerusalem (a fatal decision, as it turned out) because it was running out of steam in his home territory of Galilee.

One of the most fundamental differences between the United States and Europe is that in the States the twinkly-eyed, grandfatherly type serving you in the local store is quite likely to believe that most of his fellow humans are destined for hellfire, a band of reprobates which almost certainly includes yourself. Yet he will pack your groceries for all the world as though you were not sunk irredeemably in moral squalor, and with touching generosity of spirit show not the slightest hesitation in accepting money from a sinner. It is a striking thought that people who fix exhaust pipes, drink Budweiser and watch ice hockey also believe in demons. It is as though the president of the World Bank were to be caught chalking pentangles on the walls of his office.

There are, needless to say, conflicts as well as affinities between the puritan self and the commercial one. The puritan self mistrusts appearances, whereas the commercial self is all about semblance and self-presentation. When Americans appear on television, they tend to smile when they first come on camera. Nobody does this in Europe. One of the finest of BBC Television’s overseas correspondents has not been seen to smile for the last twenty years, and addresses the camera with the expression of one scowling down the barrel of a rifle. To add insult to injury, the journalist in question is a woman. Christopher Hitchens was never known to smile in public. The same goes for his friend, the novelist Martin Amis. Dick Cheney rarely smiles either, but this in a U.S. politician is highly unusual. Perhaps this is because when he does smile, he looks rather like the Wolf about to bite Little Red Riding Hood. Some Irish musicians are so obsessed with self-presentation that they perform with their backs to the audience, a habit which it is hard to imagine Madonna adopting. The United States believes that appearances are all-important, but also that what happens inside you is what really counts. As Walt Whitman almost remarked, if I contradict myself, well, whatever . . .

Prohibition

For many of its adherents, religion is essentially about prohibition. Puritan societies tend to be punitive ones. Bodies and their appetites can easily get out of hand, and need to be sternly disiplined. This is not the case in Amsterdam, where it is said that if you sodomise a donkey on the sidewalk, you can receive a state grant for street theatre. This has never been known to happen in Grand Rapids. Countries like the United States, which regard your success as entirely your own doing, also tend to see your failure as your fault and nobody else’s, and to penalise you accordingly. To point out that you failed at being a world-class concert pianist because you were born with no arms is a contemptible cop-out. It is a refusal to accept responsibility for your own actions, or lack of them. “We are all responsible for everything that happens to us,” Oprah Winfrey once declared, a statement that might come as a surprise to those who have landed up in intensive care because a drunken truck driver ran them down.

Puritanical societies do not simply censure and rebuke, but sometimes appear to take a grisly delight in doing so. Police officers who force detained Mexican immigrants to wear pink underclothing in order to humiliate them are not being tough but just; they are revelling in the obscene pleasures of the sadistic superego. Many Europeans find American prison sentences grotesquely excessive, and are astonished by the way that twenty police vehicles with all sirens blaring seem necessary to apprehend one seventy-year-old shoplifter. The country is plastered with prohibitions. “No Smoking Within 150 Yards of This Store” strikes one as gratuitously vindictive, like putting prisoners in shackles and bright orange suits when there is not a chance in hell of their escaping. One can imagine some creative variants on such warnings: “No Sneezing Within Half a Mile of This Bus Stop,” for example. There are signs at airports forbidding passengers to make jokes about security matters, including, on occasion, jokes about the notice itself. But what about jokes about jokes about the notice?

Law and religion are here at one. The stout Protestant assumption behind this battery of signs is that human beings are corrupt; that they will therefore do anything outrageously anti-social they can get away with; and that every conceivable kind of transgression, however improbable or bizarre, must be assiduously anticipated and headed off. “Do Not Feed These Cyanide Tablets to Your Toddler.” “Do Not Eat This Fire Hydrant.” “Do Not Bite the Flight Attendant.” “All Passengers Must Be in Possession of a Dormouse.” “This program contains images of naked geese: viewer discretion is advised.” “Eating this chocolate can cause instant death, incurable bowel disease or make your legs fall off.” There is a sign to be found in Britain which reads “Refuse to be Put in This Basket,” which seems equally gratuitous until one realises that one is supposed to stress the first syllable of “Refuse.” British flight attendants warn you not to tamper with the smoke detectors in the aircraft toilets, whereas American flight attendants warn you not to tamper with, disable or destroy them. If all angles were not covered in this paranoid fashion, some devious American lawyer might no doubt claim that you tampered with the device but did not disable it, or disabled it but did not destroy it. It is no wonder that Henry James heard what he called “the warning moral voice” in everything Emerson wrote.

Since 9/11, the United States has had good reason to worry about security. Even so, it is hard not to feel that it has gone over the top, as it does on so many issues. America is a country where it is difficult to do things by halves. Some people are surreally fat, while others are life-threateningly thin. Some can think of nothing but sex, while others seem to regard sex as more reprehensible than genocide. Some right-wingers are not just conservatives but dangerous lunatics who should not be allowed out without a keeper. Those who believe in cutting food stamps for the poor rather than raising taxes on the owners of private jets are as much in the grip of fanatical dogma as the Muslim terrorists they would love to see burning in hell. It is ironic that the United States is now faced with attacks from fanatical fundamentalists, since there is no shortage of such creatures within its own borders. East coast liberals look anxiously out to the Middle East, alarmed by the bigotry of some of its citizens. They should take a wary glance behind them as well. It is true that most American rednecks are not intent on smashing aircraft into buildings. But a handful of them are preparing for a bloody seizure of power should the nation lapse even more deeply into revolutionary socialism than it has already.

Given its religious and political history, belief in the States plays a more prominent public role than it usually does in advanced capitalist nations. Many such nations believe as little as they can decently get away with. Doctrines are regarded as a hangover from earlier times. It is not belief that holds Finland or South Korea together. It is not what holds the United States together either, but for historical reasons it is mightily more important there. Given this centrality, beliefs are more easily pressed to an extreme. Such extremism is apparent even in fairly trifling matters. Rather than just objecting to other people smoking, some Americans feel compelled to knock their cigarettes violently out of their hands. People do not just rise early, they rise ludicrously, eye-wateringly early.

Excessive zeal also applies to homeland security. Whenever you visit the States these days, you require a new photograph of yourself if the last one you submitted was taken over six months previously. It is just possible that one’s hair might have grown down to one’s knees in that period, or that one’s nose might have mysteriously morphed from bulbous to aquiline. Perhaps American eyes change colour more often than they do in the rest of the world. On submitting a new photo of myself to the U.S. Embassy in Dublin, I once ventured to joke that my fingerprints, too, might have altered out of all recognition over the previous six months, and that they might wish to take them again. They did not seem to find this amusing. On the contrary, they wrote a small note on my file, which was already alarmingly thick. In American airports, one’s boarding pass seems to be checked every three or four minutes, as though one’s identity might have altered in the process of walking from security to the departure gate.