What is America? What does it mean to be an American? Is America different from India, for example? Is being American different from being Italian? When we address philosophical questions --- in logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, etc. --- do we take different approaches and find different answers because we are Americans?
What lies at the heart of a country and its people? I shall argue here that we can answer this question only by working our way through some very basic issues. What is America as a place? As a people? As a society? And as a culture? While we will find much in common between American philosophical writers and their European counterparts, we will also find, I think, that they have all been profoundly affected by these basic issues.
First of all, America is a place. (It is, as Gary Snyder has captured it in the title of his newest book, A Place in Space.) As mere place, it has no name. (People make names.) It is a physical feature of the earth. Like every other feature of the earth, it has changed radically over the millenia. It finds its place on the earth's surface in a unique relationship with two oceans. It runs north-and-south almost from pole-to-pole. Geologically, its western edge harbors a junction between huge plates of the earth's surface, creating the conditions of mountain formation and volcanism. Its eastern edge is mostly broad plains that feature extensive river drainages and woodlands (including jungles). During the last 12,000 years, since the last major period of glaciation, the flora and fauna have adapted to milder and drier climates, both in abundance. To understand America as a place, one needs to enter this ecosystem gently, make careful observations of what one sees, and put all of this into a general framework. If we are considering this as a place-to-live, a home, then we also need to consider our own position in this ecosystem --- what in it can nurture us, but also how we can nurture it in return.
Secondly, we must consider the people who have inhabited the place we now call America. There is a well documented record of human habitation beginning about 12,000 years ago, but there is also evidence that some archaeologists believe points to much older occupation --- perhaps as early as 40,000 years ago. Even taking the closer time, there is little descriptive difference, so far as we know, between the original people of America and the rest of the people in the world. Yet, by 500 years ago, when Europeans landed their ships in North America, there were enormous differences between the European explorers and the indigenous people. Europeans had discovered the techniques for reducing metals from their ores; they had developed written languages; and they had become thoroughly agricultural early on. By a time, roughly 600 years ago, they had developed the technologies of sailing, time keeping, and astronomical observation to a degree of refinement that allowed them to sail freely across the oceans. Meanwhile, they had also developed technologies of explosives and firearms to the degree that they were truly formidable warriors in comparison to any other people in the world.
The people of America can be divided, then, into two groups --- the indigenous people and the newcomers. The indigenous people, by 500 years ago, had divided into hundreds of tribes and tribelets, speaking hundreds of different languages, belonging to more than six major language families. The traumatic conquest that began 500 years ago drove many of these tribes into extinction, greatly reduced all populations, and assimilated the rest as strongly marginalized minorities. The newcomers, on the other hand, have steadily risen to the majority population in every portion of the Americas. There were, to begin with, the Spanish. After Spain lost its domination of the seas in the late 16th Century, the English came; and after the English, the French and the Russians arrived. The English brought African slaves with them. By the 19th Century, Asian people came to find work. At this point, people from every other part of the earth have come to settle somewhere in America.
Many indigenous people called America something that can roughly be translated as "Turtle Island;" but most Americans of that period did not name their own tribes or possess a geographical vision of the greater place on which they lived. It was Europeans who created the name "America." The name first appeared in a book published in 1507 and it honored an Italian explorer/scientist, Amerigo Vespucci, who had sailed on several expeditions after Christopher Columbus (1492) and had, evidently, been the first to truly understand that a New World --- outside of the traditional world known to Europeans, including Africa and Asia --- had been found. Neither the name "Indian" nor the name "American" had any significance prior to the last 500 years. It is only with careful study of cultures and languages that anthropologists have uncovered appropriate names for the hundreds of indigenous tribes that remain.
There are three important points that we can make about the "newly came" population of America, and each of these has some bearing on philosophical issues that we shall encounter. First, out of all the people living in America (North, South, and Central), it is the people of the United States who have aggressively put themselves forward as the Americans. Others are "Canadians" or "Mexicans" or "Argentineans." An American, then, is not just a newcomer to the New World; but an American, as we use the term, is one of those specially identified people who came to live in the United States of America (or what finally became the United States). Second, while all of the New World has witnessed immigration from all over the world, America is unique in both number and variety of immigrations. In fact, America has virtually advertised a dedication to immigration --- something that seems strange to say in today's climate of hostility toward immigration of Hispanics from Mexico and Central America. Nor does America's hostility toward Asian immigrants, in both the 19th and 20th Centuries, seem consistent with this idealized claim of being a "Melting Pot" for the peoples of the world. Third, because Americans, except for the severely marginalized minority of indigenous people, are displaced members of other societies from around the world, their adjustment to America as a place is minimal. That is, their own cultural traditions reach back to other places rather than to this place. The lack of adjustment to place and consequent strain on the concept of a homeland is further aggrevated by the fact that European immigrants were not sympathetic to adaptation anyway; European societies were moving rapidly in the direction of "modern technology" with the mood that nature should adapt to man's needs, not the reverse. These three traits distinguish Americans from most other people of the world. While America remains, even today, a magnificent place in the world, it is also a people that is far from unified and often strangely unaware of the place in which they live.
The third dimension in this discussion is society. It is one thing to consider people as a stock of human generations, but it is another to recognize that humans live in societies, forming social institutions and following socially maintained patterns of behavior. As pointed out above, Americans brought social customs with them from their national origins. The question, however, is how life-in-America changed social customs. Has there been a natural direction in the evolution of American society? Are there uniquely American social institutions?
An important factor in understanding American society lies in the acceleration and transformation of European history that parallels the European occupation of the New World. Sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish conquerors and colonials who came to the New World still represented a very old feudal society. Seventeenth century English colonists were fleeing long-standing abuses of power and religious persecution. Both represented very old regimes; and surely neither anticipated the radical changes that happened in Europe through the next century and a half. From 1620 through 1820, Europe witnessed revolutions in science, politics, economy, and invention --- the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, the rise of Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution. It is not just the simple fact that Europeans flooded into the New World over the course of two hundred years; but it is also the fact that Europeans were changing their own social traditions and modifying their own physical world with unprecedented speed. Certainly, the American Revolution and, hence, the birth of an independent nation was a product of all this. By 1800 that nation stood ready to march across the continent; but these Americans were a far different people from the European colonials who had first set foot upon the New World.
In 1800, North America was a land of enormous contrasts. The Spanish were still in possession of Mexico and major portions of the Southwest, as well as the coastal regions of Alta California. While Spain had experienced some level of modernization and reform, colonial New Spain remained a feudalistic society. The Northwest was being heavily exploited for a growing fur trade by the English Hudson's Bay Company and, increasingly, by Russians moving southward from Alaska. But there was no colonization. The Great Lakes and the Ohio-Mississippi Valley system was heavily exploited by French trappers and traders. There were a few centers of colonization though mostly for the purpose of supporting trade. Stationed as they were at the mouth of the Mississippi, the French laid claim to the entire Mississippi drainage, which included the Missouri drainage as well. The deserts and mountains of the Great Basin remained essentially unknown to anyone, even the Spanish. Americans themselves, still officially confined to the original thirteen English colonies represented extreme contrasts between the old and new worlds --- frontiersmen, agriculturalists, and industrialists. All of this changed in radical ways in just fifty years.
The fact that the English colonies were carried along on a slavery-based economy has been called the "original sin" of America's birth. The impact of that "sin" has followed Americans throughout the last two centuries, and it is by-no-means spent, today. We have to look closely at the minds and spirits of those people (our ancestors) who engaged in slave trade or held their own slaves or turned their backs on the issues because it was convenient to do so. But these questions should make us aware of the various ways in which the same issues are dodged, even as we speak. Nor were Africans the only people that early Americans treated with contempt. Indigenous people of the continent were also treated as though they were sub-human and were pushed westward by the advancing frontier. The American attitude toward Indians was reflected in what they called the "Manifest Destiny" that Indians simply could not last in their native societies but must bend to the acceleration of the times and (especially) to European culture. Americans saw only two paths for Indians --- to die or to adopt the ways of Christian agriculturalists. More often than not, death was the solution.
Why should these issues bother us and what relevance do they still have? One should ask what they mean in the light of America's "democratic principles." What does it mean for a people to embrace liberty and equality of all overtly in the face of a vicious, humiliating, and dehumanizing slavery? Where were liberty and equality for the indigenous populations? And, for that matter, how were these principles applied when large numbers of Chinese and Japanese were welcomed into the Western territories as cheap laborers and yet denied full citizenship? As recently as World War II, Japanese Americans were stripped of their property and humiliated by incarceration in prison camps throughout the West. Clearly, "we the people" was never really democratic at all. But if this nation was not democratic from the beginning, we may fairly ask when it truly embraced democracy and how well democratic principles have faired on this land.
Most of the widely read political documents of our land define and defend the structure and principles of American government. They fall short, however, of defining America's political society; that is, they do not nearly so adequately inform us about what kind of society the American government is designed to nurture and maintain. We are often confused between Capitalism and Democracy, for instance, seeming to assume that the two are interchangeable. But are they even mutually compatible? Does government have the right (even, perhaps, the obligation) to restrain Capitalism?
There are other social institutions of importance, of course. Three that come to mind are class, the family, and religion. In some societies, a person is born into a certain class (defined one way or another) and the prospect of changing class is hopeless. Class membership is one's destiny for life, and it will condition everything that one can rationally expect to happen in one's life.
One is also born into a family. What is the structure and role of family in America? To a high degree the "extended family" has disappeared here, and this is something that has great social consequences --- in the education of our young, in the support of new parents, and in the maintenance of the aged. Even the "nuclear family" is disappearing, today, and is being replaced by a wide variety of parenting situations.
Religious institutions have had an enormous impact on American history; yet our relationship with religious institutions has been tentative and skeptical all along. So many of the English colonists were fleeing from religious persecution that, while they were devotedly religious people, they were extremely resistant toward any connection between religion and government. The political doctrine of separating church and state, then, has maintained the question of religious institutions as a purely "social" issue, which continues to precipitate problems --- e.g., mediation between scientific and religious points of view, state funding of religious school programs, or political influence exercised by religious groups in political parties. The proliferation of our religious rights gets pushed to the extreme where we not only have the right not to practice any religion but, indeed, have the right not to be publicly exposed to anything religious. Such a level of antagonism toward religious institutions was surely never seriously entertained by the Founding Fathers.
Finally, and perhaps most difficult of all, we must take up the issue of culture. What is culture? Does America have a culture? These are by no means insignificant or merely fanciful questions, given the number of serious texts that attempt to discover answers --- some noteworthy examples being, Alexander Meiklejohn's What Does America Mean?, Daniel J. Boorstein's The Americans, or Max Lerner's America as a Civilization.
We must begin by asking how society and culture differ. People live in societies; they do not live in cultures. A society is a group of people. A society is usually organized in a variety of ways, including families, generations, genders, classes, roles, etc. The empirical investigator, or observer, has merely to take note of the ways people consistently behave.
Culture is the coherent structure that stands behind society. Our social behaviors repeat consistently by habit because they are dictated by culture. The culture of a society includes formulae for how children will be instructed, or initiated, as well as for how culture will be defended against unreasonable interference or innovation. In other words, a culture consists of the basic reasoning behind the society as well as the numerous elements that are essential to communicating the character of the society and maintaining it.
Consider an example. As considered above, the extended family is a form of organization in some societies. How the extended family is described and justified, how it is defended against possible attacks and alterations, and how it is symbollically called to mind in narratives and objects of design and art are all elements of what we call culture. A good way to begin to understand culture is to look at children's books. In a society that has a strong cultural link to the extended family one will surely find the appropriate icons illustrated in children's books --- children, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, all interrelating in daily life.
To inquire into the culture of America, then, is to ask questions about how American society is designed and maintained. Consider the family as an example again. There has been an historic movement from the extended family toward the nuclear family in America. Most immigrants brought the tradition of the extended family with them, and those who remained in aggrarian pursuits tended to continue that tradition. However, urbanized, industrial life in the Capitalist system encourages people to think of themselves as mobile laborers, offering their talents to those who need them and will pay them wages. Mobility makes it very difficult to maintain an extended family; thus, industrialization required erosion of extended families and the formation of nuclear families. To the degree that almost 98% of the American population is now urbanized, there has been a powerful replacement of the extended family by the nuclear family. How were Americans persuaded to do this? What impact did this have on education? What are the myths that suggest and maintain the nuclear ideal? What icons give this ideal its continuing vitality for us? How does this ideal cohere with other social institutions?
When we begin to look at America as a culture, we are coming close to the most serious philosophical questions that can be asked and debated. We are, in fact, coming close to the issues, values, and ideals that hold us together and that make (or try to make) the experience of "being an American" coherent and desirable.
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