AMERICA

by Hugh M. Lewis

Being born an American may have been a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. Americans grow up under the deadening weight of crude materialism, and must later in life unlearn many of the trite truisms they were taught to believe in. Americans typically have egos several sizes too large, a bottomless stomach and an insufferable gullibility to swallow almost anything fed to them by others. Americans walk the way of the world only to wake up from their naiveté to learn that they are not immune to the evil of the world. Americans may have been spoiled by too much affluence, convenience and freedom to pursue their own pleasures. But Americans are not the only ‘ugly’ people in the world, and not necessarily the worst, the first or the last set of imperfect human beings to have come along. Indeed, in spite of their own attitudes of over achievement and others' criticisms of their life styles and their weaknesses, it is amazing that Americans have accomplished anything at all in the world.

Most people do not learn to prize their freedom until after they have lost it. Many others never have had the freedom to lose. The weak and insecure would just as soon sacrifice their own freedom as well as that of everyone else for just about any spiritual illusion that promises their salvation. For them, freedom is not a prize to be won, but a prize to be paid for by the false promise of their protection.

Freedom is having the opportunity to learn from one’s own mistakes while taking heed of the advice of others.

We cannot be genuinely free until we have learned to grant to others their freedom, even if it means forsaking our own. Learning to give for other's sake is just the beginning of the long pathway to freedom.

The first step taken, all else then follows.

It has not been military might, political power, economic achievement or scientific or technological success that has made America a Great Society. It has been the promise of its freedom, human rights and equality that it has offered to anyone seeking a better life and to escape persecution. It has been this promise that has made the United States a model for worldwide emulation. And it has not been either a false or an empty promise.

It has been unfortunate that so many new Americans have forgotten this fact in their pursuit of the unprecedented power, prestige and personal aggrandizement that success in the American system rewards. Young Americans cannot be blamed for having been raised with a false sense of values and unrealistic expectations and thus failing to adapt themselves to a quickly changing world. Nor can they be faulted for failing to carry the torch and catch the baton when their own leaders have extinguished the flame and lost their way.

It is this fact of its freedom and its promise of equality that has long made America different from the rest of the world. It has been a difference that is rapidly diminishing, not because the rest of the world is catching up with the United States, but because Americans are falling behind in its own promise to the world.

In this sense we can say that its Empire has come back home to America, and it has come to stay.

America has never been a perfect society, but it has also never been a pig sty. The progress of enlightenment, social emancipation and the realization of human equality has been slow but steady—a step backwards for every two forward. Americans have rarely been as pure of heart as they would like to see themselves. Paradise cannot be had except at great human cost, and if it is founded upon the pleasure principle, it is liable to be a paradise for the few and a living hell for the many. It is fitting that America should move slowly and be short sighted in its prospects for paradise—anything too far and too fast is bound to end in disaster for everyone.

America’s lesson in Vietnam, one that it has seemed to quickly forget, is that it is never necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. Freedom does not follow the path of bullets and bombs, broken bodies and burnt homes. The only thing found at the end of a gun barrel is fruitless destruction and the involuntary servitude to one’s own possibility of evil in the world. Too many paid too dearly for the mistakes America made in Vietnam for us to forget too soon the lessons that our own history has taught us.

The road to freedom leads through a vast, drought filled desert. The promise of spiritual salvation from all human troubles hovers above the far-off horizon like a mirage of a blue ocean shimmering above the hot, dry sands. People thirst for freedom but do not know what will quench their thirst. The source of freedom flows deeply underground.

The tyranny of aggression is that it compels the peaceful to defend their freedom. Though aggression is frequently promoted in the name of freedom, freedom is seldom won in the name of aggression.

If the best defense is a good offense, the best offense if none at all. The prize can only be lost if it can only be won by war.

Calling the vast American military machine the ‘Department of Defense’ barely disguises its offensiveness to the rest of the world. Freedom gained through ‘enforcing the peace,' whether this be a Pax Romana, a Pax Brittannica, or a Pax Americana, can only be freedom for the few at the expense of the many. At best it can only lead back to the corruption of the very society that created such unfreedom of violence in the first place.

Common virtues have given way to contemporary vices. In the name of modernity and civilization, basic human values have been forfeited for empty symbols of strength solidarity, security and superiority. Fashion and status dictate people's behavior, and these are manipulated by the large commercial interests and by government itself. Americans have had their basic character altered and modified by a mass media and a warped, uneven and exploitative incentive structure, to become gross materialistic consumers and media junkies. We are brainwashed to feel guilty for being Americans, and compelled to rush to the shopping malls to temporarily alleviate our guilt feelings.

Freedom and salvation will not be found in a Sears mail order catalogue.

Americans value the possession of private property more than they value their own freedom or even human life itself. Inordinate physical attachment to physical things in the world is precisely the opposite of the definition of human freedom. Freedom is the license to spend one’s own time and energy in one’s own way—owing someone else lots of money or paying rent for the possession and use of property can only be a vital restriction of human freedom. Any freedom upon which our society is founded can only be in name only if its promotion is ultimately based upon practices and principles of possession, unbridled profit and private property that must lead fatefully to human unfreedom.

The only ultimate bottom line is that there are no bottom lines in human reality. One must always beware those who claim to know and to have the bottom line—especially if they are trying to sell it to you.

A man may only speak for himself, but no human can justly speak for any other. We must beware those white men who claim to speak for all white men, or those black men who claim to speak for all white men, or those black men who claim to speak for all blacks, or those women who claim to speak for all women. In any such claim exists a dangerous and tacit denial of the freedom for other people to speak, and ultimately, to think, for themselves.

It is only the simple minded who seek simple solutions to complex human problems and who chronically claim to speak for others when they are only selfishly thinking of themselves, and who unconsciously and uncontrollably choose symbols of solidarity and strength over antithetical symbols of peace, compassion, love and tolerance.

People, who are themselves exploited, must find someone else to exploit in turn. People who allow themselves to be used and dumped upon must in turn find someone else to use and dump upon. People who live beneath some shadow must themselves cast their shadow upon other’s lives. What goes around comes around, and we eventually reap what we sow. No matter how hard we may try or wish, we can never escape the lasting consequences of our own choices.

To deny the role of class in American society is to deny the very basis of social inequality itself. In our ideology the very basis of social inequality itself. In our ideology of natural rights, we ascribe psychopathology to the poor and the failed, and psychological spirit and virtue to those who are most successful, all the while blatantly ignoring the background social context in which both success and failure are situated and configured. This being the norm, it follows that the predominant social collective consciousness is class consciousness—and unmarked but very deliberate awareness of an individual’s social background and relationships in the world, and these preunderstandings more often than not form the criteria of our attitudes, projections, opinions, beliefs, values, and judgments regarding both ourselves and other people in our lives. Class forms the basis of social significance and human valuation.

It follows that class always tends to reinforce, and reproduce itself. People make deliberate decisions in relation to what will promote their own class interests over those of other classes and individuals who comprise these classes. He rich help one another to stay rich, and the poor keep one another poor. It also follows that upward mobility will be the norm for the upper class—that no matter how mediocre and average a person might be, if they are born into the upper strata of a society the availability of opportunity and of rich reward and positive social reinforcement will tend to keep them afloat no matter how personally failed they may really be. On the other hand, a person born into an impoverished class background may demonstrate superlative skills, steady and unbending drive, and superior talent and abilities, but will nonetheless be consistently driven downward in society by the many, more often overwhelming, checks and controls arrayed against that person’s chances for success.

The undeniability of class inequality and function of class in perpetuating social structure in America makes American society fundamentally not very different from any other national or multi-ethnic society in the world. The elites of one country have more in common with the elites of other countries, in terms of their interests, prerogatives, values and views of the world, than they do with their own poor people. This commonness among the elites is recognized internationally as human virtue. Being born poor in a world of increasing social inequality is to have been born with a social disease—a ‘corruption’ of class.

People, who live by appearances, judge others on the basis of appearance. To live by the principle of appearance is a sort of magical formula for social success—that like produces like. One must dress in the most expensive clothes, drive the most stylish car, and talk to all the right people in the right way, and social success will follow. The surprising thing is that this formula sometimes works. One can possess all the talent in the world, but without the appropriate style of social presentation, will be foredoomed as a social failure. But to live by the basis of appearance alone is an empty, shallow, and eventually self-defeating strategy of social mobility.

Ignorance, prejudice, repressive discrimination and deceit, to the extent that these policies in life reinforce inequality and unfairness in social relations, will lead to success. But any such success will be ephemeral and short lived—those who live by the lie, die by the lie, as there are always bound to be competitors with superior advantage in the world. Honesty, though slow and inefficient, still remains the best policy, and tends to make one immune to the arbitrary vicissitudes of merely meretricious appearances.

Class-consciousness is the normal form of social consciousness informing our experience with the subtleties of social difference, solidarity, and significance upon both conscious and unconscious levels of understanding and feeling. Try as we might, we really cannot escape its structuring influence upon our attitudes, values and worldviews, either in how we see and treat others, or in how we are seen by and are treated by others. It also tends to constrain in decisive ways how we see and feel about ourselves—tending to invade, interfere with and eventually take over and control our private, inner subjectivities. It is class, which thus tends to simultaneously and contradictorily both socially revitalize and collectivize everything we see and do in relation to others in the world. It is perhaps the ultimate paradox that because class consciousness is based as much upon the illusion of appearances as it is upon anything substantially real, it becomes both the dialectical antithesis to which false consciousness is compared, and a basic form of class consciousness itself. The complicating fact of the matter is that there are few if any non-arbitrary standards of alternative or genuine consciousness by which we can compare and evaluate the concept of class consciousness. We can claim that as a social phenomena it exists in the world, but we can ultimately never prove it and may only indirectly ever point to it and say—this attitude is true and this one is false.

It is this paradox which makes such consciousness so easy to deny and to falsify.

Charity and equality do not go very far in America. Few gifts are given which are not penny-ante, nickel and dime, token or without strings attached. The American Indians learned this lesson well in their transactions with the White Men, summing it up when they said ‘White Men speak with forked tongue.’ American society is the greatest consumer society to have ever existed. It typically aggrandizes Greed and makes of selfishness and egotism a reward virtue of personal success and achievement. The formula for success has been reduced to competitive striving for one’s own profit at someone else’s expense, and the American legal structure promotes and protects the property, profits and prerogatives and privileges of the wealthy while systematically discriminating against and dispossessing the rights of the poor. Americans love any and every winner, and hate a loser. As Edgar Allan Poe well knew, Americans especially despise the poor. The trouble with this twisted social values are that ultimately only one person can become a winner, and that person must live in a very lonely and empty world.

Freedom must always be fought for, as there are always enough people in the world who are deliberately trying to take it away, the best of intentions notwithstanding.

Beyond any other inventions or feats, human rights remain the most important contribution American society has made to the world. Few other societies in history have ever made the democratic doctrine of universal human rights the foundation stone of its social order. It is unfortunate that this foundation is being undermined and eroded by the pursuit of power, pleasure and personal aggrandizement. Foreigners in America frequently have low regard or little appreciation for such a doctrine so alien to their own hierarchical values, and Americans who grow up in the fold of freedom and the lap of luxury never suffer its loss enough to appreciate what they have.

One important factor in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was its persistent failure to pay back the debt it owned to its own citizen soldiers who literally built Rome by their toil and sacrifices only to return from foreign campaigns and conquests to find themselves dispossessed and impoverished plebeians of the streets. The Pax Americana can learn an important lesson from this Imperial History.

The real loss in America is in terms of its rapidly deteriorating quality of life. The limited availability or relative lack of opportunity among any but the upper rungs of the class structure means that there has become less and less to go around for everyone. When people have talents, skills, abilities and energies that are going to waste or left unrewarded because there are fewer and fewer job opportunities to utilize these capacities, then we must ask who has been most responsible for the loss.

The political economic and socio economic shortcomings of our Great Society are due in part to the general loss of cultural confidence in our own values and orientations. The complex of inferiority and failure should never be underestimated in terms of its power as self-fulfilling prophecy in our collective life. When we see foreign competitors who, by strength of their own social organization, cultural confidence and solidarity, seem to be getting ahead of us in the market place, it is almost automatic that we should begin seeing ourselves as born losers and them as born winners. When we begin to believe this, we begin behaving in ways which tend to reinforce these ideas, as if they were true, and little can then be done, short of complete reversal of roles, to change our attitudes about ourselves.

People sometimes seem to be subconsciously aware of these attitudes and their consequences upon our lives, and will almost deliberately set out to attack our self-confidence and to undermine our basic faith in our values, abilities and beliefs.