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October 06, 2007
What Is the American Idea?
By Richard ReevesBERLIN -- Gerhard Rietdorff is 77 years old now, still living in a one-room apartment within a few hundred meters of the house where he was born in what was for 44 years called East Berlin, the capital of the communist German Democratic Republic. He is a believing socialist, never a communist, who worked as an electrician and a tour guide.
He is a bright man, well-read in several languages, an intellectual -- though you would never guess that at first glance. We were talking about the black market in post-1945 Germany, research for a book I am doing on the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. After two hours, we stood, our business done. "Can I ask you a question?" he said. "Is it true that one out of five Americans believe that Jesus Christ will come to Earth and take them to heaven? Is that an American idea?"
"Rather more than that, I think," was my answer.
"Strange people," he said without rancor. He had come to like Americans as a guide, and thought they were the best listeners to ideas with which they did not agree.
I was pleased with that last thought. Then, ironically, back at the American Academy in Berlin, where I was working, my e-mail included the online edition of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine I greatly admire. It was the journal's 150th anniversary edition, dedicated to "The American Idea." One hundred and fifty of our countrymen were asked what that phrase meant to them -- and to the future of the republic.
A half-dozen of the 50 I read did focus on God's divine plan. Some others were downright silly -- someone cited a newspaper advertisement showing a white man in bed with a black woman -- but most were serious reflections on the nation and the national expression. A significant number were negative. Joyce Carol Oates said: "How heartily sick the world has grown, in the first seven years of the 21st century, of the American idea!"
Some were celebratory. Ray Kurzweil, who describes himself as an inventor and futurist, said: "The American idea is to push beyond frontiers, whether in geography (Manifest Destiny), science (splitting the atom, DNA), invention (the telephone, the lightbulb, the airplane, the Internet), industry (mass production), music (jazz, rock 'n' roll), or popular culture (Hollywood)."
That would be nice, but you can get an argument about Manifest Destiny, and the atom was actually split by a British team at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. DNA goes back to the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel, in Moldavia in the mid-19th century, and was rationalized at Cavendish by James Watson (American) and Francis Crick (British) a hundred years later. (Kurzweil is in good company; in his second inaugural address, President Clinton also credited American with splitting the atom.)
The two best answers, because I agreed with them, came from a Supreme Court justice, Stephen Breyer, and a novelist, John Updike.
Said Breyer: "We are not unique; our ideals are not exceptional; and, to everyone's good fortune, our ability to put those ideals into practice, however special it once may have been, has not remained so."
Said Updike: "The American idea, as I understand it, is to trust people to know their own minds and to act in their own enlightened self-interest, with a necessary respect for others."
"Nobody asked me, but..." as the sportswriter/philosopher Jimmy Cannon used to say, there are, for me, two facets to the American idea, one negative, one positive. The negative is the idea that we are better than other people, rather than just different -- "City on a Hill" and all that. The positive, the great saving grace of a nation striving to be great, is the freedom to fail and then reinvent yourself. F. Scott Fitzgerald, not quoted in The Atlantic, was totally wrong when he said there are no second acts in American lives.
We are, with or without the grace of God, about nothing other than second acts -- and third, and fourth. One day we may get it right.
