For many people, the sheer physical horror of what happened on September 11, 2001, was followed very quickly by a profound questioning of American identity and the nation’s place in the world. Some Americans saw the attack as an apocalyptic warning to a nation that had become intolerably smug and self-satisfied, imposing its flawed vision on the planet through the process of globalization. Commenting on post-9/11 foreign policy, Jimmy Carter declared that “There is a sense that the United States has become too arrogant, too dominant, too self-centered, proud of our wealth, believing that we deserve to be the richest and most powerful and influential nation in the world.” The fall of the Twin Towers might even presage the collapse of the empire, so that New York might before too long be one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Other observers, though, heard a different kind of wake-up call, a reminder that for all its flaws, America still represents a vast and noble vision that we should not be embarrassed to call the last, best hope of mankind. To take a potent material symbol, when the Towers fell, the New York City skyline was again dominated by the Empire State Building. The city thus looked much more like it had in the 1940s and 1950s, the era of the vast national effort to defeat monstrous tyranny abroad, while undertaking the moral revolution of civil rights at home. If our enemies wished to revive the spirit of this older Titan America, they may well have succeeded, but they assuredly will not savor the consequences. For a while, we Americans just forgot who we were, but now we’ve remembered. Or yet again, perhaps both these visions are equally true in some measure, and this ambiguity is a fundamental part of the basic American nature. Of course we contradict ourselves: we contain multitudes. Part of our biblical heritage is the sense that election is anything but an unmixed blessing. A chosen nation is held to higher standards, and is punished for its sins and arrogance, often by dreadful cataclysms; but the nation still remains chosen.
This sense of ambiguity, of the paradoxes of America and the American world, is central to Jedediah Purdy’s Being America. The book is in large part a record of his travels and conversations in various nations—Egypt, Cambodia, China, Indonesia—in each of which he finds a deeply contradictory attitude to America and Americans, and to the processes of globalization for which they are largely responsible. Purdy himself often reflects this duality, noting on the same page that “Global capitalism is a triumph of freedom. … Global capitalism is an abomination of freedom.” As he notes, the blessings of “American modernity” are very mixed, including as they do “constitutions, regular elections, free markets, shopping malls, mtv.” Americans carry freedom to every corner of the world; Americans are the predatory spiders at the center of their global empire, their worldwide web of commercialism and militarism. Purdy is almost writing a meditation on the new American empire that some believe to be coming into existence, under a flag that offers stars to enlighten the nations, and stripes to correct them.
American power cannot fail to inspire both admiration and jealousy. The “dominant forces in the world” are “capitalism, democracy, nationalism, and America’s prominence,” and they all tend to “produce both liberty and violence.” When John Walker Lindh reached his Taliban training camp in Afghanistan, his fellow mujaheddin were excited to find that he was American, and wanted to know just what part of the evil empire he hailed from. Even as the world is furiously adopting American styles and values, that same dissemination is producing a massive reaction in the form of anti-modernism and anti-Americanism, a package that is often associated with fundamentalist religion. To adapt the title of Benjamin Barber’s study, the creation of McWorld necessarily incites Jihad.
Purdy’s book is a series of explorations—really a collection of loosely linked essays—about the reasons for this paradox, and the chances of resolving it. The book has many flaws. Purdy’s analysis is often amateurish, the writing tends towards cliché, and the basic point about the dualities of globalization has been made before, not least by Barber. Purdy’s choice of examples tends toward the painfully predictable, especially when he selects quotes to illustrate American self-perceptions: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lincoln, all fine—but not those exact same examples again? I was almost worried that he was going to miss Winthrop’s “city upon a hill,” until there it appeared, right on schedule, on page 43 (misquoted as “city shining on a hill”). The dilemmas of globalization are equally illustrated by tried-and-true case-studies. Of course he talks about the Zapatistas, about aids in South Africa, about the globalization of activism and radicalism, of the emerging world of multiple diaspora communities. So have dozens of commentators and journalists before him.
Having registered these complaints, I should say that some of Purdy’s observations are genuinely striking, especially when he addresses the whole “chosen nation” theme. At times, there is a problem of voice, so that it is difficult to tell when he is being ironic. Americans so dominate the world, he says, that “where two or more are gathered, we are with them. Wherever one is trying to make sense of her life, we are there.” Is he being serious? Considering that Purdy’s first book, For Common Things, concerned the problem of misplaced irony, this may seem like a curious complaint. At other times, though, American claims to messianic status are presented with what seems like perfect seriousness. The book even begins with the boast that “Once again, America is a prophetic nation.”
Despite the exalted language, though, America’s global mission does not appear to be explicitly religious. Christian missionaries mainly appear in the book as emissaries of globalization, who arouse nationalist and fundamentalist resentment in the Muslim and Hindu worlds. Purdy portrays the Christian solidarity movement, which aims to relieve the sufferings of oppressed Christians around the world, in very mixed terms. While praised for its “courage, conviction and magnanimity,” it is also said to exemplify the American vices of “parochialism, moral arrogance, and a streak of romanticism.”
Throughout Being America, Purdy offers a good number of assertions and one-line analyses, some of which are shallow and forgettable, some more penetrating, but one aphorism in particular inspires reflection: “Forgetfulness keeps a people open to the world.” Much of the book concerns memory: the memory of past glories and grievances, how memories are used as the basis of ideologies and nationalisms, as the foundations for hatred and revenge. For Purdy, though, America is different because of its flight from memory, its constant self-reinventions. We don’t hate, he suggests, because we remember so little:
Forgetful America is poisoned against no people, and looks to the future in the expectation that, no matter how the country changes, it will remain itself. We will hardly remember—as we hardly remember now—having been anyone or anything else.
This amnesia manifests itself in the recurring myth of national innocence, a state that every generation believes itself to be losing. Depending on the history books you read, “America lost its innocence” with the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, the Depression, at Pearl Harbor, on September 11 … and generations yet unborn will probably think that only in their time did the nation lose its primal simplicity. If only they could have shared the simple, naïve faith of the early 21st century, a time of plain living and high thinking! A chosen nation may just need a fundamental myth of Eden and the Fall. Purdy’s argument may or may not be entirely convincing, but I for one will never have the same confidence in quoting Santayana’s observation that those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it.
When I was reading Being America, I had occasion to visit a place that perfectly encapsulates the themes of the book, namely the shrine that has developed spontaneously at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to the victims of United Flight 93, lost on September 11. It is in some sense a memorial to battle, to what some have called the first struggle in the war against terrorism, but the commemoration is astonishingly powerful in its simplicity, its lack of hatred, and its naïveté. A marble memorial recalls the heroism of the “passangers,” each of whom is individually commemorated by a figure of an angel. In its innocence, its patriotism, its populism, the Shanksville shrine proclaims a simple faith, a version of “Being America” that has never lain far below the national consciousness, and which endures despite all the boasting and materialism. May it be many years before the federal government steps in to produce a neatly manicured bronze memorial with noble sentiments and correct spelling. And yes, among the countless memorabilia that visitors have left to show their respect, there is a figure of Mickey Mouse.
Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author most recently of The Next Christendom: The Coming Global Christianity (Oxford Univ. Press).
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