Category: Sunday

America gave the world a new type of nation-state. It is a befitting irony that as the nation-state paradigm itself begins to unravel at the seams, much of the rest of the world would enter into a contradiction with the most successful expression of nationality—and nationalism—that the modern world has witnessed.

As a rampant Republican presidency and a refulgent nation continue to confound friends and foes alike, there is a profound anti-American animus abroad. The global liberal intelligentsia are still reeling from what they considered the shocking and inexplicable defeat of the democratic standard bearer in the just concluded presidential elections.

In much of Western Europe, particularly in France, America’s foremost bete noire, the atmosphere is of funereal gloom and depression. Famously, The Mirror of England wondered how fifty eight million people could be so dumb.

A lot of this hysteric mush boils down to pride and prejudice on both sides of the divide. It is the jaded arrogance of the old world contending with the blithe contempt of the new. In many respects, it is also the return of the repressed. Four years ago when George W Bush controversially prevailed over Al Gore despite losing the popular vote, many saw a plutocratic conspiracy to crowd out America’s democratic masses from political contention.

This time around, it was clear that it is the son of the older Bush that has connected with the electoral mystery that is Middle America. Why then must the rest of the world feel it has the right to legislate the destiny of America for Americans? And having conceded that crucial point, why would middle Americans be so blatantly contemptuous of anti-American sentiments abroad? Is this brilliant rallying to the star-spangled banner a heroic defence of American core values against the tired cynicism of Europe or the reflex circling of the wagons by a nation under global siege?.

The case from abroad is arguable enough. As the most powerful and militarily dominant nation the world has seen, and as the richest society in human history, America should lead the world to a more humane and civilized society. This can be done by a more multilateral approach to global issues, less belligerence abroad and a political conservatism that is at once compassionate, conciliatory, less conflictual and more consensus seeking.

The American riposte to this stinging indictment is equally telling and bespeaks a mutual misapprehension of historic magnitude. The way to a more humane and civilized world is not through liberal flip-flopping or paying protection money to diseased despots but a proactive policy of exemplary retribution which is as retroactively punitive as it is harshly pre-emptive. There must be no dialogue with “the axis of evil”. The nations so branded must be militarily subdued and pounded to submission.

 That it is this Samurai code that has found resonance with the American moral majority, particularly after the spectacular siege of September 11, 2001, is no longer contestable, whatever the consternation of the rest of the world. When it was reported that there was a record turn out in the last presidential elections, many were the tele-pundits  who thought that the real owners of America were on the march to reclaim their nation.

Alas, it turned out the other way round. The quiet Americans had turned out to validate the machismo mantra of the son of George Herbert Walker Bush. The world may never be the same again. Is this then the new face of an empire that has been in denial for a long time, or the evidence of a sharp divergence between European democracy and the American mutant?

America was founded on the ruins of feudal Europe. It was a bold and brilliant attempt by revolutionary visionaries to create humanity anew. When George Washington, its first president, declined another term which could have turned him into a new type of king and the American presidency a monarchical institution, he set America on the path to becoming a radical democracy and the first truly revolutionary society the world has seen.

This may seem a moot point, but when set within the context that succeeding revolutionary attempts to create humanity anew have often ended up with the founders dying on the throne or mutating into senile and murderous despots, the issue becomes clearer. Take a sample: Lenin-Stalin, Mao, Tito, Castro, Yong, Neto, Cabral, Mugabe etc.

The dictatorship of the revolutionary vanguard, rather than transforming into a genuine democracy, often becomes a historic nightmare: the privatized rule of the paranoid patriarch or the protocol of berserk elders.

George Washington might have been responding to the push and pull of a truly modern society, and the republican zeal engendered by the fact that that at that point in time, there were more lawyers in America than armed soldiers. Whatever it was, it set America on the path of a nation in which institutions and institution-building were more important than the cult of the exceptional individual.

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The military would never dare to take over power in America, and neither would a putative tyrant survive for very long in the White House. The democratic institutions and a vigilant civil society would take care of that. The system may occasionally creak at the joints, there may be a murmur of muted disorder as new and unenvisaged historical realities intrude, but the over-ride gear prevails and America reverts to its default settings.

The anarchic obverse of this sterling coin is the triumphalist and naïve optimism it breeds, the belief that the nation can even afford to live dangerously, and that everything would be alright eventually. Worse still, every American voter considers himself or herself to be a miniature monarch, a mini-sovereign entitled to determine the destiny of the nation.

In periods of strive and anxiety, this may turn the presidency itself into an agenda-driven, divisive platform rather than a subtle mechanism for aggregating contending national interests. But again, this is part of the irony of the American dream in which a man’s destination is more important than where he is coming from, in which anybody can technically aspire to the greatest positions in the land without being thwarted by the circumstances of birth. What is important is how far you can push yourself.

When it works, the American dream is a glorious advertisement for egalitarianism and the democratic empowerment of the gifted and driven individual. When Benjamin Franklin, the Philadelphia publisher and inventor of genius, arrived in Paris as the ambassador of the new nation, he affronted not a few members of the chic Parisian elite with his brashness, his brazenness, his boundless vivacity, his spontaneous bonhomie and his obvious refusal to be fazed by the frigid norms of a frozen feudal fiefdom.

It was then sniffily observed that it was only in America that such a man could become an ambassador. It was meant as a despairing put-down, but it was also a stupendous compliment to the American dream. As it was in the beginning, so it is beginning to look in mid-day.

 Till date, the French political circles never tire of inveigling against American brashness and vulgarity, their aversion for the finer points of taste, political sophistication and diplomatic savvy, while the Americans are openly disdainful of the cloak and dagger elusiveness and unreliable political somersaults of the European political elite in general, and the French in particular.

 In a memorable diplomatic bust-up, an American secretary of state once famously dismissed his British counterpart as a duplicitous bastard while the Whitehall mandarins eternally wring their hands about the global disaster of having diplomacy conducted by American boys’ Brigade.

This perilous background of mutual misperception explains the current European –and global—anxiety about the direction of the American nation, and it is a function of a divergent trajectory as the impact of globalization and America’s unrivalled dominance finally hits a world in denial. The American success is predicated on relentless and often manic competition: competition among individuals, competition among institutions, competition in which humans become unfeeling automatons and cyborgs on auto-pilot.

 Even eating is a competition. You do not eat a sandwich but you grab one and ram it down to go back to work. In restaurants, you are asked whether you are still “working’ on the stuff. Compare this with the epic feast of pounded yam eating in Things Fall Apart, the stupendous orgy of consumption at a Yoruba ceremony or the elaborate twenty-four course meal of the French, and you begin to sense that there is no freeloading in Uncle Tom’s cabin.

 Yet if this neo-Calvinist ethos with its harsh protestant Puritanism has produced the richest society the world has seen, it can also turn a nation into a hard and unfeeling monad. America is by far the richest country in the world, but it is far from being the happiest society. The competition and work ethics criminalize poverty, and the poor are looked upon with a mixture of disdain and pity.

There is a Victorian prudery abroad which often provokes its own sexual pathologies, and there is a zero-tolerance for filth and squalor which often induces an obsessive neatness and primness in public places. A reflex hostility to theocracy prevents a sustained dialogue with Islam and often hardens into a puritanical contempt for the thieving fascist clerisy that dominates the Middle East. Yet no one remembers that Islam itself started as a revolutionary doctrine, a new covenant between the ruled and their rulers. A new, bible-thumping fundamentalism of the self-righteous right is in danger of unleashing on the world a technological dark age and new march of modern crusaders.

Blissfully unaware of the danger to itself and the menace it constitutes to the global order, America romps on in rampart militarism. Honed by competition, relentless training and ceaseless self-surpassing that has turned its military into the supreme fighting machine of the epoch, buoyed by an embarrassment of riches beyond the compass of human imagination, America carries all before it in a triumphant swing which would have made the Romans wince in envy and admiration. It is a shining city on the hills, and there is no room for doubts, or for the old world philosophers of gloom and prophets of scarcity.

Perhaps we are witnessing the stirrings of the first truly post-modern society, a post-primate order in which ordinary people achieve the extra-ordinary. Perhaps it is a prelude to a catastrophic unraveling. Whatever it is, America—and George Bush—should pause momentarily and look back at the old empires of history. If they cannot do this on their own, let them import philosophers from the old world.    

 First published in 2004 (Excerpts)