Uncle Sam on the couch
Johnny Grimond
GOD WON’T SAVE AMERICA by George Walden Gibson Square Books, £16.99, pp. 302, ISBN 190393379X V £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 According to George Walden, the United States is a country with a psychosis, which the dictionary defines as a serious mental disorder characterised by, for example, delusions and a lack of insight into his condition on the part of the patient. No wonder that even sympathetic foreigners, says Walden, understand less than ever what makes America tick. This book is his attempt to enlighten them.
‘How can America’s intellectual and technological sophistication be reconciled with primitive attitudes on gun law and capital punishment?’ asks Walden. ‘How can its creed of self-seeking be combined with its religiosity? And how can its culture be at once infantile and highly mature?’ Why, in particular, is American society ‘manically sexualised’? Easy, he says: it is all the fault of the Puritans. Putting America on the couch, he examines its contradictions, hypocrisies and neuroses, in everything from sex and crime to business and foreign policy. All, he declares, can be explained by the enduring influence of this bunch of early English immigrants.
Part essay, part rant, often perceptive, sometimes wildly wide of the mark, his analysis contains lots of good stuff and is mostly rather enjoyable. The ‘mental isolation’ of America, the narcissism of its incumbent president, the paradox of a country that is curious about everything except abroad: these are among the many topics elegantly picked over. His carefree approach to the central proposition (never mind the spelling, punctuation or footnotes) allows a few sideswipes at non-Americans, too: Russia is crippled by ‘chronic immobilism’, Britain is ‘an ex-world power, on whose willingness to make international judgments the sun never sets’, and so on. And on the Puritans, those ‘utopian pessimists’, Walden is subtle and interesting. On the ubiquity of their influence, though, he is unconvincing.
First, his ability to attribute to them all the oddities of modern America is possible only with an attitude to logic that is as elastic as his treatment of evidence is Procrustean. Unwelcome facts are either ignored or dismissed. Thus Walden claims that the Lewinsky affair — the open discussion of the presidential penis, the sexual inquisition, the debate about the varying methods of sexual congress —showed how much the times have remained Puritan, and if they also showed how far America has strayed from its traditional Puritan reserve that also, apparently, makes his point. Then there is the ‘cropped’ prose style inherited from the Puritans by Americans such as Hemingway, in which ‘even commas are seen as sinful’. So what about Henry James and those American writers who go in for decorative elaboration? Oh, they are evidence of the ‘inevitable reaction’.
American business, notes Walden, is both free-market and interventionist. That just shows how much it owes to the Puritans. The country’s high crime rate is likewise asserted to be as much attributable to the Puritan cult of individualism as to the consequences of slavery, ghetto life and poverty. And, by the way, America’s ‘new religion is “cool”... Everyone and everything in America now claims to be easy, relaxed, playing behind the beat.’ Has Walden never met an American who is ‘focused’ or ‘driven’? No matter, being cool is apparently evidence that the United States is trying (unsuccessfully to throw off its Puritan legacy of guilt and introspection.
In other words, Puritanism can be so capaciously defined as to accommodate any and every aspect of American life, or else the evidence can be chopped and boxed to make it fit. And to lend spurious authority to the argument, various pundits are periodically dredged up from obscurity to lend support or be debunked. The surname of one of these straw men is actually Paglia, which means straw in Italian, making one wonder whether Walden is not engaged in a huge game at the reader’s expense. It seems unlikely, though: Google reveals that she is a social critic and professor of media studies.
The tricks are necessary because the thesis is simply implausible. Walden would have us believe that the legacy of about 20,000 pious English emigrants who settled in Massachusetts and Connecticut in the middle of the 17th century accounts for what academics call American ‘exceptionalism’ and remains the dominant influence on American life, even though most Americans today have few, if any, roots in Puritan England. For two centuries now most immigrants have come from very different places — Catholic countries like Ireland, the ghettos of central Europe, Africa, Asia or Latin America.
That is not to say that the Puritans have had no lasting influence; that would be absurd. Nor is it to say that America isn’t a peculiar place; it is. But it is peculiar in many ways that Walden ignores, and that provide a much more plausible explanation for most of its oddities than the one he offers. Quite simply, America, unlike almost all other countries, is founded upon ideas, not upon common ancestry, history, geography or religion.
These ideas include many that the Puritans held dear, but their origins go far beyond the beliefs of those religious dissenters, to Locke and Hume and Montesquieu and others. They are written down not so much in Puritan sermons as in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, and less formally in the anyone-can-make-it stories of Horatio Alger and the mythology of the American Dream. Together they form an ideology, which may be called Americanism (a concept that was dignified by a Senate committee in the McCarthy era). Its potency is such that it not only draws immigrants of every colour and religion from all over the world but then binds them together into a nation. One reason America has never had a serious socialist party — a puzzle that Walden cannot quite account for — is that its people do not need another ideology when they already have one, Americanism.
The big trouble with this book is not just that the thesis is wrong, it is that the premise is wrong. America is indeed odd, but that does not mean it is psychotic. The central oddity is that America is dedicated to the pursuit of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Happiness, please note. Could Puritanism really be the key to understanding any country engaged in the pursuit of a such a worldly, if not hedonistic, concept?
Johnny Grimond is writer-at-large at the Economist.
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