I began reading the great (and not so great) novels during my twenties as a pleasant distraction from studying medicine. I read more during my thirties while studying political science—again, just for fun. Most of the novels that I read were published sometime between 1800 and 1950, before the greatness in novels dropped off considerably.
Interestingly, many of the authors went beyond fiction and travelled to America to write serious studies of the country. Even in their fiction, insights about America pop up here and there. Among foreign visitors we tend to think of Alexis De Tocqueville and James Bryce as the primary expositors of America, with Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau, De Crevecoeur, and other writers occupying a second tier. Yet the great novelists also had something special to say about the United States. If not political theorists, they had a novelist’s eye for detail. They also had a sense of the ridiculous and the absurd, something important when trying to explain democratic America to European audiences.
What they saw and wrote remains relevant today. Even though he never visited these shores, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, recognized what America was all about. The French have their culture, Tolstoy observed, and the British have their commercial interests. But the Americans have their freedom.
True, Tolstoy never saw American freedom in action, and assumed that it meant government by the mob. But American conservatives (and some moderates), while agreeing with Tolstoy on the importance of freedom in America, know the opposite to be true. They know that freedom not only co-exists with social order in America, but is essential to that order.
Nevertheless, certain cultural traits, political tendencies, and behaviors manifested in today’s America trouble conservatives. Is the mob coming after all, they worry? Is the republic in danger? Have Americans really changed so much since the country’s founding? Conservatives aspire to “conserve” the best of the American tradition, and they see in these new disturbances a threat to their program.
This is where the great novelists who visited America long ago can help. For many of the things that scare American conservatives today were observed by these writers in their time. What seems new and scary has been around for a long time. Reading literature reminds us that what appears destabilizing, if not downright crazy, may be our normal.
It is in this spirit that I title this blog “American Crazy,” after that very 1950s American song written by Willie Nelson and sung by Patsy Cline, titled “Crazy.” The song includes the line, “Crazy about you.” America often seems crazy; the great novelists picked up on all that craziness. Nevertheless, I’m crazy about America—and optimistic about it, too.
Here is an example, with more to follow in the coming months:
Today, we fight with one another over fundamental principles; we scream at each other; nothing seems sacred. At any moment, with so many moving parts, one wonders if the country will fly apart. Rather than experiencing social order, we appear to be in a state of barely controlled anarchy, living in a system beyond the capacity of any one person to grasp. Perhaps Tolstoy was right about the dangers of freedom?
Yet none of this is new. In 1931, French writer Georges Duhamel, in America, the Menace, said of the country, “It is no longer within the scope of the minds that created it. No one can any longer form any effective and clear idea of it.” “God himself…” he wrote, before trailing off. Yes, God himself could not understand America.
Duhamel said Americans are “caught in the meshes of a machine, of which soon no one will know the secrets.” The social organism, he believed, was simply too complex for any one person to grasp, even in the smallest aspects of life. And yet most Americans just go about their business without minding the chaos.
Contemplating the twenty elevators in an American skyscraper, a number unheard of at the time in Europe, Duhamel asked the maintenance man what he would do if the electricity gave out. To the author’s surprise, the man calmly replied, “Oh, we are connected with three different generating plants.” When Duhamel asked the captain of an enormous American boat if he could identify himself with his vessel, the captain calmly replied no; the boat’s steel beams, its pipes, its complex inner workings—they were all too much him to comprehend. He just focused on steering the boat, which was the only task he could get his mind around.
The inextricable complexity of the American economy, the dizzying rhythm of America politics, the long list of religions, the strange languages spoken down the block that people in other countries would have to travel to the ends of the earth to hear—the list goes on. Yet the challenge of each remains the same. All these phenomena are beyond the capacity of any one mind to grasp. They are out of scale.
So how do Americans survive in a system of barely controlled anarchy that arises from so much freedom? The answer to that question was also voiced calmly long ago. In the early 1860s, an American on the frontier explained to English novelist Anthony Trollope, perplexed by how anyone could survive amid all the chaos: “They have to be smart,” the man said. “You see on the frontier a man is bound to be smart. If he ain’t smart he’d better go back East—perhaps as far as Europe. He’ll do there.”
The experience of living amid controlled chaos, whether that chaos involves elevators, ships, health care (the anarchic field that I worked in for thirty years), politics, or America in general, unpleasant though it at times may be, is also a source of the American genius. We Americans live in whirlpools, jerked and dragged in different directions, not the least by federal government, with its mighty tugging power, threatening to suck everyone down. But in living amid the foam and swirl, we grow used to living in a tangle of competing forces. As a result, we adapt ourselves to most things, take charge of most things, and succeed in most things. Controlled chaos, what many people fear, Americans call home.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw said of the American Constitution that it is not really a constitution but only a “Charter of Anarchism”; it is not an instrument of government, but “a guarantee that America should never be governed at all.” “And that is exactly what the Americans want,” he added. Not much surprises Americans as we roll on toward no one knows what.
The inability of any one person to grasp the whole in America is actually a source of the country’s stability. Duhamel compared America to the civilization of ants. Unlike human civilizations, ant civilization has lasted for centuries on centuries, he said. There are no revolutions among ants, as no one ant can know, or even hope to know, the whole of ant life. Revolutionaries in European countries often targeted a capital city, knowing that by capturing it, they could capture the country. Capturing Washington D.C. could never produce such a result, Duhamel said. “No revolution in the American ant-heap can be imagined…America may fall, but American civilization will never vanish,” he wrote. The ants just go on.
And so do we—crazy, and in freedom.
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