Looking back on 40 years of visiting and living in the United States, I
think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent
there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: To know
New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did
so for four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though my
wife, Marlene, joined me for the whole semester only three times, it
was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives rather than
visitors. I have spent a lot of time in the U.S.A. teaching, reading in
its marvelous libraries, writing, or having a good time, or all
together in the Getty Center in its days in Santa Monica, but what I
learned from personal acquaintance with America was acquired in the
course of a few weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville, that would
have been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America,
the best book ever written about the U.S.A., was based on a journey of
not more than nine months. Alas, I am not de Tocqueville, nor is my
interest in the U.S.A. the same as his.
If written today, de Tocqueville’s book would certainly be attacked as
anti-American, since much of what he said about the U.S.A. was
critical. Ever since it was founded, the U.S.A. has been a subject of
attraction and fascination for the rest of the world, but also of
detraction and disapproval. However, it is only since the start of the
cold war that people’s attitude to the U.S.A. has been judged
essentially in terms of approval or disapproval, and not only by the
sort of inhabitants who are also likely to seek out “un-American”
behavior in their own fellow citizens, but also internationally. It
substituted the question “Are you with the U.S.A.?” for the question
“What do you think of the U.S.A.?” What is more, no other country
expects or asks such a question about itself. Since America, having won
the cold war against the U.S.S.R., implausibly decided on September 11,
2001, that the cause of freedom was again engaged in another
life-and-death struggle against another evil, but this time
spectacularly ill-defined enemy, any skeptical remarks about the United
States and its policy are, once again, likely to meet with outrage.
And yet, how irrelevant, even absurd, is this insistence on approval!
Internationally speaking, the U.S.A. was by any standards the success
story among 20th-century states. Its economy became the world’s
largest, both pace- and pattern-setting; its capacity for technological
achievement was unique; its research in both natural and social
sciences, even its philosophers, became increasingly dominant; and its
hegemony in global consumer civilization seemed beyond challenge. It
ended the century as the only surviving global power and empire. What
is more, as I have written elsewhere, “in some ways the United States
represents the best of the 20th century.” If opinion is measured not by
pollsters but by migrants, almost certainly America would be the
preferred destination of most human beings who must, or decide to, move
to a country other than their own, certainly of those who know some
English. As one of those who chose to work in the U.S.A., I illustrate
the point. Admittedly, working in the U.S.A., or liking to live in the
U.S.A. — and especially in New York — does not imply the wish to
become American, although this is still difficult for many inhabitants
of the United States to understand. It no longer implies a lasting
choice for most people between one’s own country and another, as it did
before the Second World War, or even until the air-transport revolution
in the 1960s, let alone the telephone and e-mail revolution of the
1990s. Binational or even multinational working and even bi- or
multicultural lives have become common.
Nor is money the only attraction. The U.S.A. promises greater openness
to talent, to energy, to novelty than other worlds. It is also the
reminder of an old, if declining, tradition of free and egalitarian
intellectual inquiry, as in the great New York Public Library, whose
treasures are still, unlike in the other great libraries of the world,
open to anyone who walks through its doors on Fifth Avenue at 42nd
Street. On the other hand, the human costs of the system for those
outside it or who cannot “make it” were equally evident in New York, at
least until they were pushed out of middle-class sight, off the streets
or into the unspeakable univers concentrationnaire
of the largest jail population, per capita, in the world. When I first
went to New York, the Bowery was still a vast human refuse dump or
“skid row.” In the 1980s it was more evenly distributed through the
streets of Manhattan. Behind today’s casual mobile-phone calls on the
street, I still hear the soliloquies of the unwanted and crazy on the
pavements of New York in one of the city’s bad decades of inhumanity
and brutality. Human wastage is the other face of American capitalism,
in a country where “to waste” is the common criminal slang for “to
kill.”
Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the U.S.A. does not
simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as
the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the
acknowledged model for the world. As the football coach said: Winning
is not just the most important thing, it is all there is. That is one
of the things that makes America such a very strange country
for foreigners. Stopping for a brief holiday with the family in a
small, poor, linguistically incomprehensible seaside town in Portugal,
on the way back from a semester in New England, I still remember the
sense of coming home to one’s own civilization. Geography had nothing
to do with it. When we went on a similar holiday to Portugal a few
years later, en route this time from South America, there was no such
feeling of a culture gap overcome. Not the least of these cultural
peculiarities is the U.S.A.’s own sense of its strangeness (”Only in
America … “), or at least its curiously unfixed sense of self. The
question that preoccupies so many American historians of their own
country, namely, “What does it mean to be American?,” is one that
rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries.
Neither national nor personal identity seemed as problematic to
visiting Brits, at all events in the 1960s, even those of complex
Central European cultural background, as they seemed in local academic
discussions. “What is this identity crisis they are all talking about?”
Marlene asked me after one of them. She had never heard the term before
we arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967.
Foreign academics who discovered the U.S.A. in the 1960s were probably
more immediately aware of its peculiarities than they would be today,
for so many of them had not yet been integrated into the omnipresent
language of globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the
deeply entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of American culture.
For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville’s day, not the passion for
egalitarianism but individualist, that is anti-authoritarian,
antinomian, though curiously legalistic, anarchism has become the core
of the value system in the U.S.A. What survives of egalitarianism is
chiefly the refusal of voluntary deference to hierarchic superiors,
which may account for the — by our standards — everyday crudeness,
even brutality with which power is used in and by the U.S.A. to
establish who can command whom.
It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their country,
in ways in which the inhabitants of other well-established states
simply were not with their own. American reality was and remains the
overwhelming subject of the creative arts in the U.S.A. The dream of
somehow encompassing all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe had set out to write “the great English novel” or “the great French novel,” but authors in the United States still try their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at “the
great American novel,” even if they no longer use the phrase. Actually,
the man who came closest to achieving such an aim was not a writer, but
an apparently superficial image-maker of astonishingly durable power,
of whose significance the British art critic David Sylvester persuaded
me in New York in the 1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre
like Andy Warhol’s have come into being, an enormously ambitious and
specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the
U.S.A., from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies,
dreams, nightmares, heroes, and heroines? There is nothing like it in
the visual-arts tradition of the old world. But, like the other
attempts by the creative spirits of the U.S.A. to seize the totality of
their country, Warhol’s vision is not that of the successful pursuit of
happiness, “the American dream” of American political jargon and
psychobabble.
To what extent has the United States changed in my lifetime, or at
least in the 40-odd years since I first landed there? New York, as we
are constantly told, is not America, and, as Auden said, even those who
could never be Americans can see themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed
anyone does who comes to the same apartment every year, a vast set of
towers overlooking the gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be
recognized by the same Albanian doorman, and to negotiate domestic help
as in years past with the same Spanish lady, who in her 12 years in the
city has never found it necessary to learn English. Like other New
Yorkers, Marlene and I would give tips to out-of-town visitors about
what was new since the last time they had landed at JFK and where to
eat this year, though (apart from a party or two) unlike the
permanently resident friends — the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the
Katznelsons, the Tillys, the Kramers — we would not entertain at home.
Like a real New Yorker, I would feel the loss of a favorite
establishment like that of a relative; I would exchange gossip at the
regular lunches of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New
York University, with the mixture of writing people, publishers, show
persons, professors, and United Nations staff members that makes up the
local intellectual scene — for one of the major attractions of New
York is that the life of the mind is not dominated by the academy. In
short, there is no other place in the world like the Big Apple. Still,
however untypical, New York could not possibly exist anywhere except
the U.S.A. Even its most cosmopolitan inhabitants are recognizably
American, like our friend the late John Lindenbaum, hematologist in a
Harlem hospital and jazz-lover, who, sent to Bangladesh for a project
of medical research, had traveled there with a collection of jazz
records and his ice-cream scoop. There are a lot more Jews in New York,
and, unlike in large stretches of the United States, more people there
are aware of the existence of the rest of the world, but what I learned
as a New Yorker is not fundamentally at odds with what little I know of
the Midwest and California.
Curiously, the experience, what in the ’60s they used to call “the
vibes,” of the U.S.A. has changed much less than that of other
countries I have known in the past half-century. There is no comparison
between living in the Paris, the Berlin, the London of my youth and
those cities today; even Vienna, which deliberately hides its social
and political transformation by turning itself into a theme park of a
glorious past. Even physically the skyline of London, as it can be seen
from where I live on the slopes of Parliament Hill, has changed
– Parliament is now barely visible — and Paris has not been the same
since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have left their marks on it.
And yet, while New York has undergone the same kind of social and
economic upheavals as other cities — deindustrialization,
gentrification, a massive influx from the Third World — it neither
feels nor looks like a city transformed. That is surprising when, as
every New Yorker knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen
the arrival of fundamental innovations in New York life, such as the
Korean fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic New York
lower-middle-class institutions as the Gimbel’s department stores, and
the transformation of Brighton Beach into Little Russia. And yet, New
York has remained New York far more than London has remained London.
Even the Manhattan skyline is still essentially that of the city of the
1930s, especially now that its most ambitious postwar addition, the
World Trade Center, has disappeared.
Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the U.S.A. is part
of global humanity, whose situation has changed more profoundly and
rapidly since 1945 than ever before in recorded history. Those changes
there looked less dramatic to us because the sort of prosperous
high-tech mass-consumer society that did not arrive in Western Europe
until the 1950s was not new in America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a
historic chasm divided the way Britons lived and thought before and
after the middle ’50s, for the U.S.A. the 1950s were, or at least
looked like, just a bigger and better version of the kind of 20th
century its more prosperous white citizens had known for two
generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the Great
Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the same lines as
before, though some sections of its citizens — mainly the
college-educated — began to think differently about it, and, as the
countries of what is now the European Union became more modernized, the
furniture of life with which European tourists came into contact began
to look less “advanced,” and even a bit tatty. California did not seem
fundamentally different to me driving through it in the 1970s, 1980s,
and 1990s from what it had looked and felt like in 1960, whereas Spain
and Sicily did. New York had been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants for
all my lifetime; it was London that became one after the 1950s. The
details in the great carpet of the U.S.A. have changed, and are
constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in
the short run.
As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability,
large and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones.
Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change
of American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of
American life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general
terms its habitus, or
way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an 18th-century
Constitution reinforced by two centuries of Talmudic exegesis by the
lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the
U.S.A. are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all
other states. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the
election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of
government. But it has also made the government of the U.S.A. largely
immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions,
since rapid, effective national decision-making, not least by the
president, is almost impossible. The United States, at least in its
public life, is a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities,
because it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough to do so.
It is the only country in my political lifetime where three able
presidents (F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment’s
notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without
making any noticeable difference to the course of U.S. and world
history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and
great individuals have a hard case in America. That has created the
foggy mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more
opaque by the sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group
money, and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish
between the real and the increasingly restricted political country. So,
since the end of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has quietly prepared to
function as the world’s only superpower. The problem is that its
situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is
geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and
provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its
power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated
to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower,
however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the
occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear.
Nobody controls the U.S.A. today. That is why, as I write my
autobiography, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize
the world.
(Unfortunately, nothing that has happened since the above paragraph was
originally written calls for a revision of the views expressed in it.
The “occupational disease of conquering powers” has been reinforced by
the Iraq war. The policies and strategic ambitions of the global
dominators have destroyed the genuine “coalitions of the willing” on
which U.S. supremacy could rely in the cold war, and even more so in
the international mobilizations of the first Persian Gulf war and after
9/11. They have left the U.S.A., unable to win a plurality of free
votes in the U.N.’s Security Council, in unprecedented isolation and
global unpopularity, surrounded by fear rather than hope. The world has
unquestionably been more destabilized not only — patently — in the
Middle East but everywhere: in Europe, where the European Union is
divided and weakened and NATO has crumbled; in East Asia; in what
existed of an organized international system, whether of states or
nonofficial organizations. As the victorious U.S.A. prepares for the
post-Iraq presidential elections, uncertainty surrounds even the public
discourse, which veers between the language of ruthless power politics,
self-delusion, lies, and Orwellian newspeak.)
Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of the
massive impact of cultural and economic Americanization, the rest of
the world, even the capitalist world, has so far been strikingly
resistant to following the model of U.S. politics and society. That is
probably because America is less of a coherent and therefore exportable
social and political model of a capitalist liberal democracy, based on
the universal principles of individual freedom, than its patriotic
ideology and Constitution suggest. So, far from being a clear example
that the rest of the world can imitate, the U.S.A., however powerful
and influential, remains an unending process, distorted by big money
and public emotion, a system tinkering with institutions, public and
private, to make them fit realities unforeseen in the unalterable text
of a 1787 Constitution. It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most
of us would not want to copy it. Since puberty I have spent more of my
time in the U.S.A. than in any country other than Britain. All the
same, I am glad that my children did not grow up there, and that I
belong to another culture. Still, it is mine also.
Our problem is rather that the U.S. empire does not know what it wants
to do or can do with its power, or its limits. It merely insists that
those who are not with it are against it. That is the problem of living
at the apex of the “American Century.” As I am 86 years of age, I am
unlikely to see its solution.
I’ve been meaning to post about our recent trip to Russia for a week or so now. But then again it’s been a busy week. Where to start? Well, the picture to the left may be the best place. That’s me, last Friday in Krasnoyarsk at the big regional economic summit. Krasnoyarsk, if you’re not by a map, is in Siberia. Far eastern Siberia, north and just a little west of Beijing.
