On Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, lessons for our world from theirs
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/202040/americans-the-almost-chosen-people
When we speak of culture in general, we typically think of fixed roots in the form of memory, custom, and habit. Yet the salient characteristic of the American character is restlessness, as Tocqueville observed. We are journeyers rather than settlers. We are risk-takers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. How then should we think about ourculture?
One approach is to steer clear of the problem and define America as a “propositional nation,” as John Courtney Murray contended. A proposition is something one assents to rationally. Culture, by contrast, is the context in which we perceive things, which we receive from our ancestors and pass down to our descendants. It is pre-rational, instinctive rather than intellectual, a manifestation of who we are rather than what we think. It is the way in which we cannot help but understand the world.
It is one thing to assert that a proposition is true and quite another thing to pledge one’s life, fortune, and sacred honor. The American Revolution is in some ways the strangest conflict in history: There is no other example of prosperous, property-owning people who were free to publish their thoughts and practice their religion taking up arms against the world’s most powerful empire. Four generations later, half a million Northerners died to end slavery.
If America is merely a propositional nation, moreover, then this proposition can be taught to any other nation, like a proof in logic. From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, our attempts to instruct the rest of the world in the American proposition have had baleful consequences, and it behooves us to consider the side of being American that cannot be learned but rather must be lived—what we call culture.
American culture is so singular that the general concept of culture we inherit from the Old World does not suffice to cover it. Critic Russell Kirk refers us to T.S. Eliot, who wrote:
[T]he term culture … includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.
These are the sorts of quaint things American tourists used to look for in England, that is, when England still had them. If we Americans had things like that, we would put them in a theme park. I do not mean to deprecate Eliot. His is the common-sense way to think about culture, and to deviate from it takes us into deep water. Nonetheless, Eliot’s definition does not well suit the American example.
For Martin Heidegger, our Being-in-the-World, or Dasein, always occupies a particular space in a particular temporality. “Heritage” for Heidegger refers back to something like an autochthonous peasant archetype. In his later years Heidegger withdrew to a cabin in the Black Forest to write dithyrambs to the German Heimatendangered by the encroachment of technology. Americans do not stay in any one place long enough to accrete the Bodenständigkeit, or rootedness, that Heidegger sought at the core of our Being. No wonder Heidegger hated America.
Recently Alexander Gauland, the deputy chair of the ultra-right Allianz für Deutschland, called Americans “a people thrown together by chance without an authentic culture.” It is true that we do not have a high culture to compare to Europe’s, for all the good that did them. We cannot claim a national poet with the stature of a Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe. Not until the 1920s did we discoverMoby-Dick when critics in search of an American classic rescued Melville’s work from 70 years of obscurity. We have Walt Whitman, the butt of innumerable parodies, and Hemingway, the subject of a famous imitation contest.
America nonetheless has a distinct national culture, with a national epic, a national poem, and a national place.
It is instructive to start in medias res, with the most original and influential work of American fiction, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, whence “all modern American literature comes,” as Hemingway said. Its flaws shed light on our problem as much as do its virtues. Twain devised the most arresting image in American literature: the runaway boy Huck and the escaped slave Jim, fragile and free on the great river. The evocative opening of the novel, though, eventually fades into a disappointing sequel to Tom Sawyer. “The book ends so lamely,” Harold Bloom rightly observes. Nonetheless, we forgive Mark Twain his sin of literary construction and love the work. Our critics, I think, misunderstand why. Lionel Trilling thinks Huck is a “servant of the river-god,” while Bloom cannot decide whether Huck is a “wholly secular being” or an “American Orphic.” This seems far-fetched. What fascinates us in Huckleberry Finn is not the plot but the image of the journey itself. Twain gives us the most poignant picture of a journey ever imagined by an American: the vulnerability of the two fugitives against the backdrop of the great current that bisects the American heartland.
