Would the Real American Identity Please Stand Up

In attempting to respond to Erik’s recent comments on my previous post, I found myself deep in the throes of writing a full-blown follow-up essay. Rather than try to squeeze this into the comments section where it might be lost or overlooked, I thought I would share it here, for ease of continued conversation and debate. But please do check out the comment thread that sparked this post if you have the time, especially because Jeff’s response covers many of the points I had originally planned on making and does a thorough and congenial job of laying out a few of the most obvious difficulties in trying to identify a singular, united American identity.

What follows is my own expansion on these basic issues. I might also have titled it “A Deconstruction of American Identity,” for it is really a lengthy treatment of several different attempts to define what “American identity” means as a socio-cultural construct, and then the reasons why I find each approach inadequate. Although destruction on the material level can be as easy and quick as smashing someone’s sandcastle, I have found that the deconstruction of an intellectual or mental-emotional concept, especially one as repeated and defended as “American-ness,” often takes a great deal more time and energy, sometimes even a lifetime of contemplation. There are certain mystics who talk of “spitting back up the apple.” What they mean is clearing out and cleansing ourselves of all our dearly-held beliefs and assumptions, vomiting up the fruit of the tree of knowledge so preciously guarded. Some, like the Zen Buddhists, work at quieting thoughts and sinking to a place deeper than the chattering monkey-mind; others such as Socrates, Descartes and other Western philosophers, use the chatter of the mind itself as the path that leads to unknowing, following it spiraling down chasing question after question. But the emptiness of unknowing, the chaotic mystery or Mystery underneath the layers of rhetoric and assumptions… within this emptiness is where we become free. Only with that freedom can we begin to ascend the spiral again and choose, with wisdom and efficacy, to “opt in” to the creative process of making and naming ourselves.

Is American Identity a Choice?

In his first reply, Erik characterized a “living system” by saying: “the land, people, ideals and institutions are all constituent parts of the system, and inextricably interrelated.”

While I appreciate this characterization and I believe such systems do in fact exist, I agree with Jeff that the United States does not seem to me to qualify as one in actual fact (the issue of “consensus reality” is one I will come back to). Though I am comfortable with “fuzzy concepts” and porous, fluid boundaries, what I am not comfortable with is fundamental incoherence, especially when such incoherence is routinely put in the service of other people’s agendas. And fundamental incoherence is what I find whenever I try to explore the concept of “American identity” more deeply than the usual patriotic platitudes.

Let’s say, for a moment, that there is an American identity that we can choose to “opt in” to. This raises several immediate problems in my mind. First, the way Erik speaks of it seems to imply that this “opting in” takes the form more of acknowledging an established fact than choosing to cultivate a particular socio-political/cultural identity. We (whoever “we” are) simply and factually are American, and we must recognize and accept this fact consciously, otherwise we will just be living in a state of denial that hampers our ability to effectively shape our personal and social identities. But these two statements — that on the one hand we have to consciously and purposefully “opt in” to a social identity, and on the other that this social identity has already been determined for us by circumstances beyond our control — seem to be in contradiction. Now, I’ll grant that the creative construction/shaping of personal and social identity is a complicated process that involves both conscious choice and unchosen circumstances. Skin color and gender jump to mind, both of which then give rise to certain cultural conditions and responses from others depending on the particular society one lives in.

But the question then becomes: Is American identity one of those “unchosen circumstances” that we must work with? Or is it a choice we must purposefully make? Or is it the end result of the process of identity-construction itself, that thing which our choices and circumstances work together to create? If American identity is the end product of conscious choice brought to bear upon unchosen circumstances, then one can “opt out” of American identity without rejecting or denying the reality of those circumstances (i.e. one can make different choices, resulting in a different emergent conception of personal and social identity that may not be “American” in character). If American identity is a choice we make, then again we can choose otherwise and it will be this alternative choice that influences our relationship to unchosen circumstances. So the only way that “American identity” functions in the way Erik implies is if it is a “fact” of uncontrollable circumstance.

But is it? The problem with declaring that American identity is simply a fact and not something chosen is that it makes a mockery of the history and self-proclaimed ideals of the country he is seeking to define and defend. The United States, as a geopolitical entity, has always been primarily a “settlers’ state,” a country of immigrants, exiles and members of various diasporas from all over the world. Such immigrants — traditionally imagined as coming to America in search of the American Dream of freedom, equality and the white picket fence of prosperity — are celebrated precisely for embracing American identity, for choosing American identity. So when do they become truly “American,” and if American-ness is a fact and not a choice, is it possible that such immigrants can ever truly become “American” at all? (In that case, then, are any of us? How many generations does it take to get to the “America” at the center of an “American family”?)

Three Possible Sources of American Identity

Perhaps we would like to define American identity primarily according to one’s legal status as a United States citizen. After all, citizenship is for many of us an “unchosen circumstance,” but it can be chosen by someone wishing to “opt in.” Most Americans these days are born into citizenship, born on U.S. soil (i.e. within a U.S. state or territory) or to parents who are citizens. For those who are not, the requirements for becoming a U.S. citizen involve a certain period of residence within the U.S. as a Green Card holder, as well as a naturalization test on English and civics (although the U.S. supposedly has no designated “national language” and a sadly high percentage of its born-citizens themselves lack a solid working knowledge of history and the fundamental processes of government).

But it seems arbitrary to define “American identity” purely in terms of legal citizenship. Firstly, such a definition makes it practically synonymous with state-determined legal status (which is often ill-defined and continually in flux in any case) and does not capture or speak to the implied social or cultural aspects of the identity. Secondly, the cultures that exist within the United States vary widely from coast to coast, some very heavily influenced by the presence of non-citizens and illegal immigrants. In some areas, the distinction between an “American” and an illegal immigrant is hardly cultural at all, but rests primarily on the fact that the latter lacks the protections and rights of citizenship as granted by federal and state law. The possibility that one’s “American identity,” when defined in terms of citizenship, is arbitrarily dependent on the legal decisions of the ruling government are evidenced in current debate about granting citizen status to illegal immigrants residing and working within U.S. borders. The vehemently negative responses such debate provokes in some signals that our conception of what it takes to be “American” is not so easily and arbitrarily determined. On top of all of these considerations, I’d point to the interesting historical fact that it was not until 1924 that Native Americans were considered legal U.S. citizens (before this time, they were required to go through the same naturalization process as immigrants if they desired citizenship), and many even today consider themselves part of nations separate and distinct from the United States though existing within its borders, resulting in disputes about U.S. military access to Native American lands.

So it seems clear we cannot define American identity as a simple “fact” identical to United States citizenship. Similar problems arise when we attempt to define it in terms of residence on certain lands or within certain communities. Community and landscape share the same kind of mixing of unchosen circumstances and freely-made choices — one is inevitably born into a particular community, which is itself shaped by the particular ecosystems and landscapes from which it emerges, but at the same time a person can also choose to move and, in doing so, may slowly acclimate or assimilate into the new, chosen community and land. However, though communities and landscapes themselves are largely organic in character and evolution, which communities and landscapes “count” as “American” is heavily determined by their geographical location within or outside the United States geopolitical borders, and this is again a matter of government law which for the most part overlooks cultural distinctions. In this way, the towns and communities of Alaska are taken for granted as “American” communities even though the state lacks even a single mile of shared border with another U.S. territory, even though Alaskan communities share more in common with nearby Canadian communities in culture, landscape and lifestyle if not in federal law, and even though Sarah Palin, considered by some the epitome of an American politician and a potential nominee for the 2012 presidential election, can see Russia from her house.

This apparent arbitrariness in determining which lands are “American” and which are not might not present such a problem if there was even the slightest semblance of continuity or homogeneity among them. In nation-states that cover relatively small geographical areas and/or naturally shared bioregions or ecosystems, this can quite often be the case. It is easy to understand Ireland as a coherent culture and nation, for instance, in that it exists on a single island and the communities there share a common ground of history and landscape stretching back thousands of years. (Ireland is also an excellent example of how the processes of colonialism and arbitrarily-imposed state borders drawn without regard to the natural coherence of community can cause eruptions of violence lasting centuries and contribute to socio-political instability in a once cohesive region.) But as Jeff rightly points out in his comment, this is simply not the case in the massive, sprawling landmass of the United States. Instead, we discover an almost mind-boggling diversity of landscapes, bioregions, cultures and communities within U.S. borders (and the organic development of many different nations and cultures of Native Americans indigenous to the land before the arrival of European immigrants and the program of “manifest destiny” helps to illustrate this fact).

In my experience this diversity becomes even more apparent the more deeply-rooted a person is within a particular landscape and community. For someone who has lived in Pennsylvania my entire life, the differences in culture from Massachusetts to South Carolina to Colorado jump out at me powerfully whenever I travel. Such differences were even apparent when I moved from Lancaster County to the suburbs of Philadelphia to attend college, and then to the heart of Pittsburgh after graduating. After both moves, interactions with “locals” (especially those with family roots in the area going one or two generations back) led to conversations where they were able to pin down that my hometown was in south-central Pennsylvania; and returning to Lancaster after extended periods in Pittsburgh especially, I too experienced a profound sense of how different the communities were. My sense of being a “native Pennsylvanian,” shaped largely by the northeastern woodlands and rolling farm landscapes that span the state, is fairly well-established, but attempts to extend this sense of rootedness in land to the whole of the United States territory simply does not work.

So again, it seems clear that, like citizenship, the primary way these many different landscapes and communities are all identifiably “American” rests on the U.S. government and its ability to establish and control its borders. We might want to define American identity, then, in terms of a given set of ideals — such as freedom, equality, social justice, democracy, etc. — that guide and shape cultural expectations and social communities. Indeed, this seems to be the most popular way of defining American identity, especially around national(ist) holidays like July 4, and the one that most people rely on when asked to supply a brief summary of “what it means to be American.” Like citizenship and socio-physical landscape previously discussed, values and ideals occupy this murky realm between freely-chosen and uncontrolled circumstances. Some people are born into communities which teach these ideals and values as a matter of course and may even to some extent exemplify those values in public life and local civil society. On the other hand, people not so lucky may still come to value such ideals as freedom and justice on their own, through personal experience, reasoned contemplation and further education.

But such an approach, as you might expect, raises problems of its own. The first comes up if we again consider the situation of the archetypal “American immigrant” as that individual who comes to the U.S. in search of these ideals. If a person holds such ideals before ever coming to the United States, is it then fair to say that they were “American” all along? (This is similar, it seems to me, to the claim by many Pagans that they did not so much convert to a Pagan tradition, as discover they had really been “Pagan” all their lives.) Is someone “American” only if the valuing of these ideals leads him to seek U.S. citizenship and/or a life within U.S. borders? We speak of our “founding fathers” and American revolutionaries as embodying American identity and ideals, and yet such individuals held these ideals before the United States as a geopolitical unit even existed in its own right. (And shall we consider the case of those individuals — not many, granted, but they do exist — whose commitment to freedom, equality and social justice has led them instead to renounce U.S. citizenship or flee the country in order to escape the imposition of unjust laws or punishments imposed on them for attempting to hold to these ideals?)

Such questions reveal the very real problems with attempting to equate American identity with a particular set of values. Erik chastises Jeff and I in our responses to my previous post for focusing too heavily on the sources and origins of these ideals, which are almost entirely non-American in character. We were led to do so, however, by commenters attempting to justify the intimate association of these ideals with American identity. The argument presented generally relied on two assumptions: one, that even if history shows that these ideals were not American in origin, then at least the United States is a paragon and living embodiment of such ideals; and two, that even if history shows that the U.S. is not always or even often a paragon of these ideals, then at least such ideals are uniquely American in origin. The circular logic of such an argument, defeated by the facts of history at every turn, is immediately apparent. If these ideals neither originated within the United States, nor find their primary or unique embodiment in the cultures of the U.S., then in what way, exactly, are they “American”?

Beyond the question of whether or not certain universal human values such as freedom, equality and justice can fairly be called “American,” there is another fundamental problem with attempting to define a national identity in terms of abstract values. Doing so encourages, on a subconscious and sometimes even a conscious level, the identification of American-ness with a certain form of idealism which then places that identity, and all those with even apparent claim to it, largely beyond criticism. Erik writes of educating his children on “the good and the bad”, “the failures as well as the successes” of the United States, but my impression of this education is that it concerns the ups and downs of American history, not of American identity itself which he seems to have largely characterized as an idealized and therefore ahistorical abstract. There is no “downside” to American identity, only occasional “failure” to live up to its implications (and these failures are almost always the failures of others, historical or political figures portrayed as having somehow “failed” or betrayed their “American-ness”). (N.B: This is an extrapolation of Erik’s point based on similar arguments I’ve heard from others, and not something Erik himself has said — I hope he steps in to clarify his view of this matter in the comments section!)

By extension, accepting American identity as defined primarily by universal human values and their (actual or imagined) realization, we find we inevitably judge not only the U.S., its government, historical figures and fellow citizens according to these standards, but other countries and non-U.S. peoples as well. We conceive of the faults of others outside the U.S. in terms of how closely they live up to what we consider “American ideals.” This is only natural, for these ideals and values really are universal in their nature and implications. But the result of confusing universal values for “American values” is that we spend a great deal of time wallowing in the self-congratulatory criticism of the “non-American” (I’m reminded of the Bad Religion song lyric, from “American Jesus”: I feel sorry for the earth’s population, because so few live in the U.S.A.) while rarely turning a critical eye to our own embodied values or giving honest credit to those who manage to uphold ideals of freedom and justice in “un-/non-American” ways. As a result, our understanding of what values such as freedom, justice and equality actually look like when realized in the world is impoverished and flat-footed, draped always in the colors of the American flag.

The Role of Incoherence in American “Consensus Reality”

But this impoverishment in understanding is only a potential consequence and echo of the basic confusion and incoherence that arises from attempting to pin down any firm sense of “American identity.” In examining these three potential sources of that identity — which we might describe as state, land, and nation — we discover not only that no single one of them holds up satisfyingly under closer scrutiny, but that none of them present a coherent unifying theme which we might then bring to bear on the other two and, in classic Venn-Diagram style, find that fuzzy-edged triangle of archetype where all three overlap. Instead, what we find at the heart of each is a contradiction. At the core of American citizenship is the archetypal problem of the immigrant or exile. At the core of the American socio-physical landscape is an almost limitless diversity held together by arbitrary borders. At the core of American values is the exclusionary principle that would restrict universal values like freedom and deny the equality of non-Americans in sharing and upholding them. Any attempt to identify an interrelated “living system” of these American themes is doomed to incoherence and contradiction practically from the start. Indeed, it seems that the most American characteristic of all is one of rootlessness and confusion.

What is all the more fascinating and disturbing is the role of the United States government as the source of much of this incoherence. We have already seen, on final analysis, how both citizenship and socio-physical landscape rely solely on the laws and boundaries of government for their definition as “American” (when they might otherwise find definition in unique aspects of diversity in landscape and heritage), and also how this realization seems particularly dissatisfying, leading us to further searching. We do not like to imagine that our cultural identity as Americans can be renounced or denied by government mandate, and indeed we celebrate certain historical figures as heros (not least “founding fathers” such as Washington) precisely for their willingness to resist government control and reject the state as the primary ruling power of culture. We conceive of this rebelliousness, in particular rebellion against the state, as especially “American” in quality and in keeping with American notions of freedom, justice and equality. Yet at the very same time, when it comes to the current U.S. government, we take particular pride in the belief that the state upholds precisely these values, and we justify these values as American based largely on an ahistorical, decontextualized reading of certain founding government documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. It is the existence of these documents that helps most members of the public resolve the two-part contradiction of values that I covered earlier (i.e. the fact that the U.S. is neither a paragon of these values nor their originator).

And so, the picture that coalesces out of all of these considerations is one in which the United States government functions as a kind of anchor for an invented tether of “American-ness” which serves to reign in and steer all of these myriad contradictory concepts. Furthermore, the government (and more recently the political punditry increasingly prevalent in the media) acts as the primary source of this tether, partly through the making and enforcing of laws, but also through perpetuating an image of “American-ness” as the unspoken common ground which all communities and individuals share together. The people living in Alaska are American and not Canadian (or merely Alaskan) because they agree to be American, they follow the laws of the United States government, and they engage in various nationalist holidays and rituals (as dictated by the federal government and shaped in terms of an imagined national culture), the primary purpose of which is to solidify through participatory symbolic acts this shared American identity. In other words, “American-ness” is essentially an abstract archetype which does not become real until we make it real, by behaving “like Americans.” This is, as far as I can tell, what Erik means by “consensus reality” — a reality that we all agree to participate in together.

The trouble is that it makes very little sense to say we are de facto participants in such a consensus reality, for consensus inherently rests on the very notion of consent, or choice. We may participate in consensus reality out of ignorance or habit, or due to a failure to exercise our own cognitive liberty, or because participating benefits us personally in ways that have made us hesitant to question or challenge the consensus. But a failure or refusal to exercise choice is not the same as the absence of such a choice. Furthermore, we should hesitate to make the claim that it is the very fact that others are different from us, or voice disagreement with our views, that makes them American (as Erik seemed to imply about our own disagreement). Diversity, like freedom, is not an American quality but a universal one. Yet when we claim that we (whoever “we” are) are de facto participants in the consensus reality of American identity, we not only deny the ability of others to consent freely to this identity but we subsume diversity itself into American identity.

This is how the tether of American-ness works. Each of these aspects of a society — the government as a political institution and its processes, the values and ideals that shape discourse and behavior, and the landscapes and physical resources available to and sustaining the individual and the local community — have potential trajectories of their own. We might follow the ideal of freedom, for instance, with a deep commitment and penetrating analytical mind, and in doing so we might find that we are led to embody that value in particular ways in our lives. Perhaps this ideal of freedom leads us to challenge the necessity of government or, at the very least, the way a particular government functions. We seek reform or, if the situation is dire, rebellion and revolution. But here is where the tether of American identity pulls taut. For rather than follow the trajectory of this value, the tether of American-ness, anchored as it is to the United States government at its center, bends that trajectory back around on itself, and we find in our current society that what was once conceived as an act of rebellion and revolution, such as the chance to peacefully overthrow the current government leadership every few years, has been transformed into the epitome of “civic duty.” The same occurs with notions of diversity — we might engage in our local communities in ways that are deeply authentic and informed by a profound sense of rootedness in the land, and in doing so we may develop unique “indigenous” cultures supremely suited to the landscape and sustainable for future generations. But when we tie the tether of American identity to diversity, we put limits on its ability to diverge too far from pre-defined consensus reality. Instead, we harness the momentum of that drive for diversity to serve the needs of corporate consumer models that market to an endless overlapping of demographics and subcultures.

Indeed, this is almost always what happens when we swing the trajectory of authentic engagement according to the tether of a nationalist identity (American or otherwise): values and potentials that threaten the stability of the consensus reality are quickly subverted or brought into the service of that consensus. The placement of values like freedom, equality, justice, diversity and even a distrust in government itself at the proclaimed foundation of U.S. government, compounded by a corporate-consumerist economic system that has become expert in psychological manipulation and the manufacture of desires, makes American identity particularly susceptible to this kind of tethering. Rational thought bent by the tether of American-ness and confused by the kind of incoherence that arises from contradictory messages about what constitutes patriotism and honor, soon finds itself running in circles, as we have seen already, turning from one justification to the next as each one fails. When we have fully transcribed that circle of justifications and find ourselves dizzingly back where we began, we declare this to be a “living system” of interrelated aspects, even one that is inescapable and in which we are de facto participants. In any case, True Americans pride themselves on their hard work, and those who follow the trajectories of values like freedom and justice, though they soon feel the tension and strain of the tether bending and turning their efforts aside, persevere in the hopes that by doing so maybe they can succeed in making that circle just a little bit bigger.

And the truth is, sometimes they do. The history of American identity is, in some ways, the history of a gradually expanding circle, as generation after generation goes trudging along tethered to an identity of mishmashed ideals that have no deep coherence other than a kind of beautiful, shared stubbornness. There is something even rather noble in that persistence — that hope to “bring down the system from the inside” — if it is undertaken with a clear understanding of the nature of the struggle. What worries me is what I see today: a circle that, in some ways, is actually contracting, like a tethered dog chasing a squirrel until he is all tangled and tied to the pole. What worries me is that in so many ways — ecologically, militarily, economically — America the Beautiful seems to be at the end of its rope.

And it is quickly becoming a question of whether we hold on…. or face the risk, the fear and the joy of letting go.