Americanity
I have been thinking about this post for awhile, doing a fair amount of listening these days, now a member of Audible. Practically, I have found that listening spares me from the eyestrain of added reading after long winter days in front of a computer. I have not only been listening to books but also enjoying podcasts and lectures and sermons and songs forwarded to me by friends. Oh, and yes, all day long while working, I am also listening to my patients and their family members and staff members and others who come through.
I am an active listener, and this means that I will often pause or slow down the conversation to be sure that I am grasping what is being said. I do this, at least, when time permits. It is good to be curious about the perspectives of others and to ask good questions. Assumptions are shortcuts which are often in error.
Author, Chimamanda Adichie, talked about how stories are told, and the risks of only hearing one perspective in a great TED Talk called, "The Danger of a Single Story". Here, she raises so many good points, but one of the main points is how those from dominant cultural positions are able to tell stories which form impressions, but are incomplete at best and totally misleading at worst. This twenty minute talk is worth a listen.
One of the dominant themes of our culture is often heard in my exam room, "I just want to remain independent." More than wanting to live a much longer life, the desire for independence seems to grow with age, even as independence itself if given long enough, inevitably shrinks. Is this mismatched expectation unique to Americans? Perhaps not, but I think Americans may struggle with aging more than those living in many other countries, because it is part of the story we have been telling about ourselves for centuries.
Allow me to call it Americanity. It is a religion of sorts, a belief grounded in the mythology of ever increasing prosperity, everlasting life, and enduring independence. Some have used the word, "American exceptionalism" to describe phenomena like this. For example, we can still hold to the myth even though we still have Americans who have food insecurity, for whom the American dream remains beyond reach, who live twenty years shorter lives than those in the next town over and who remain trapped in financial predicaments or disability or unrelenting addiction.
I believe Americanity is what allowed the current president to rise to power, because there may somehow be a deep-seated desire and even a willingness to compromise our values if we could somehow attain to what seems to be great riches, old age, and "doing what (he) says he is going to do."
Americanity bucks up against empirical reality that not all will prosper more and some will lose, we are all mortal beings whose only hope of everlasting life comes from faith, and we are increasingly becoming interdependent. If we don't die first and live into old age, we will all become increasingly dependent upon others. Our prosperity is more tied up with our neighbors than some would care to imagine, as global warming threatens impoverished communities which mostly occupy the shores of the rest of the world even as our shorefronts are mostly occupied by the affluent. Covid-19 seems to know no borders; though we do hope health officials will help restrain its spread. Despite all our efforts in the medical profession to keep our patients alive and well for as long as possible, mortality is universal. As for independence, the world economy is so intertwined that the very food on our tables depends upon it.
So why, against all odds, can Americanity stand?
Why do most of our movies end happily ever after?
Why are politicians suggesting that solutions to our social ills is simply "more skin in the game" yet not addressing structures that are broken and designed to further help those who have helped already and leave others out who are not as able to help themselves as is implied?
Why were so many of us shocked at 9/11, that there could possibly be others around the world who despise us?
Why were we shocked when Wall Street crashed, as if capitalism would naturally have a benevolent course without checks and balances?
Why were we stunned when neighbors, family members and friends have lost houses because of medical bills because the broken healthcare system is so full of those who have profited by a broken system that they will block common sense reforms in order to continue to profit?
Why did we somehow allow someone of such low moral fiber who has been so exploitative, so selfish, so self-promoting, so demeaning of the weak, so stealing, philandering, crooked and dishonest to occupy the highest seat in the land?
Why is there so little questioning of Americanity? It is an idol which has the life to destroy us all. Americanity disables families as they struggle with the desire to "do what grandma wants", yet with peril around every corner. It keeps young and old in a pathological state of social isolation, to the point that we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. The desire for connection has never been greater, yet interdependence is a threat to Americanity. It is going to take more than a little bit of intentionality, however, to overcome it.
It is going to have to be a 180. In Christian terms, this is called repentance. We are going to have to let go of the false views of Americanity in order to thrive together. Being realistic about prosperity is one thing. We must realize that even though we would rather have it be so, it is not true that every American has the same opportunity to prosper. We have no choice about the family into which we are born or the neighborhood or state or our country of origin. From birth, there is difference in opportunity ranging from the unchangeable to the hard-to-modify system-induced disparities. Our love of money has allowed our country to arrive at the obscene point of wealth inequality where we now find ourselves. "Systems are designed for the outcomes they achieve," I recently heard it said. It is no time for apathy on this matter. Though we may never achieve perfect equality, because of man's sinful and selfish nature, it is right to press for at least more fairness in systems.
In Christianity, we do believe in everlasting life, similar to Americanity; however, the means is opposite. In Christianity, the path to everlasting life (after death) is to put one's own life into entire dependence upon Jesus, whose bloody death on the Cross became the purchase for eternal life. There is nothing we can do to earn our own salvation. This is one of the greatest offenses of the Gospel to those deeply invested in Americanity, because Americanity at its root is a self-salvation mission. The Americanity narrative places all emphasis on everything one can do to live a longer life. Some of these are not bad things, like exercising and eating healthfully. But even those who do these things are eventually going to die. In other words, the dream of living forever by one's own effort is eventually proven untrue by the obvious point that we will all experience bodily death.
Finally, the notion of enduring independence is nothing new. Since Eve ate the fruit and Adam followed her, we have all suffered an insatiable desire to be on our own, to not need God. I think the notion that we do not need one another is more unique to Americanity. Americanity, in fact, is often conflated with the more established religions. Spiritual people will attest to needing God, for example, more mostly for what God can do for them in a crisis or an hour of deep desire. When God disappoints the expectation of spiritual people, it is easy for them to turn back down the trail of their own self-determination. It is also easy for any of us to fall back on the self-reliance of Americanity, thinking we can do everything for ourselves, without any help at all. But when has this ever been true? Of all of the animal kingdom, we need parenting for the longest. As libertarian as some would like to be, very few of us are growing our own food or wiring our own electricity.
Americanity is the ocean stream we have been swimming in. It takes effort to follow a different current, or some of us would say that it takes faith.
True Christianity, in contrast, has a very different belief proposition. Christianity would attest that, like every great snowstorm, every good gift descends to us from above. If we are materially prosperous, it is because we are blessed. If we are poor, it is because we are blessed. That is another radical point, Jesus! If we are blessed, it is not just for us to enjoy, but rather we have been blessed in order to bless others. To believe in Jesus is to believe that though we will die a bodily death, and that Jesus also died a bodily death, we will be raised back to life just as Jesus was and will live forever with no more tears or sorrow or pain or death. So, Christianity and Americanity both believe in everlasting life, just very differently! Americanity is proven wrong by the very reality of death we all face.
Finally, perhaps the greatest difference is this. Christianity is about total dependence, first upon God, and then upon those God has placed around us. This is an affront to the individualism that has been stoked for so many centuries by Americanity. It is something American Christians may need to learn to see as we interact with brothers and sisters who were born in other countries or who were raised in sub-dominant cultures here where there is a much greater grasp upon interdependence. "No man is an island," reads a poem by John Donne; though, I suspect he had a streak of rugged individualism and fell himself, like the rest of us tend to do, into the danger of only one story.
