Anyone taking a jaunt through the hallways and rooms of our home, the first thing that is likely to jump out is the sheer amount of attention our walls and shelves give to New York City. If asked, the reason for this visible presence woulld take the shape of a story. More specifically, the story of our relationship and our marriage. NYC has held an important place for us through the years on numerous levels, and remains an integral part of our journey.
Why do I mention this? Because I was thinking about my relationship to America as of late, in this present climate. In truth, NYC is far from alone in its respresentation on the walls and shelves of our home. That same tour would take you from the north shore of Duluth and the Mississippi waters to the coastal walkways of Savannah and the highway stretching the Pacific shores. You’d walk past Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant in L.A, the museums and bars of Nashville, the full stretch of the Smokey Mountains, Elvis’ home in Memphis, the canals of Olkahoma and the Greenwood District in Tulsa, the largest boot in the world in Red Wing, the riverwalk in Chicago, the arch in St. Louis, the old wood chipper in Fargo, the old route 66, MLK in Alabama, the historic Cheers bar in Boston, and the many national parks inbetween.
Not to mention the many many memories we have of our endless trips to Minneapolis.
All of which is to say, I have always loved spending time in America. I also can’t ever remember a time when all of these memories have been mired in so much tension. These days I find myself responding more and more frequently and more and more viscerally to American stories in books and film. While it’s been an intentional choice not to travel south of the border these past few years, it also hasn’t been a struggle to enforce.
What makes it worse is that these feelings, for as much as I know they are shared by many, are extremely hard to communicate. Because for me, in truth it reaches further than Trump and the rise of the American political “right.” It reaches further than appeals to “Christian nationalism.” For me, what the present moment has unearthed is something I think I have felt intuitively for a long while but have simply become more and more aware of as the years go on- a striking disillusionment with and cynicsm over the entire western enterprise.
To be clear, I don’t think this is reducible to “America.” However, America does carry a very specific represenation when it comes to the rhetoric that holds that western narrative in play. In fact, I would say that sits at the heart of the present shift in focus and attention that we are seeing across Europe and Canada over the past few months, responding to the ways in which America has presented itself in common speech as the reigning authority in matters of global politics by distancing ourelves and reimagining our relationships in different directions. As the analysis tends to go, there is a sense in which some people believe the problem is all the countries comprising Nato that have been failing to take responsibility for its seat at the table, making it necassary for America to hold us all to account. In this narrative the rest of us have been taking advantage of America’s wealth and might, and the time has come to start carrying our load.
Let me be clear about why this narrative bothers me. It’s not because the “truth hurts,” as I have heard plenty of americans suggest. Rather, it’s because the assumptions that lie behind this narrative are, for me, a massive part of naming the larger problem when it comes to that “western enterprise.” Let me clear about this as well- these assumptions underlie both sides, left and right, when it comes to American politics. The assumption is simply this: western progress, western democracy, western liberal (in the truer sense of the word) ideals, call it whatever you want, is the answer to the world’s problems.
And there is no way to get to America without first assuming and accepting that this particular lens does indeed reflect the truth of things. The fact that both sides of their political divide see America as the great protecter of this enterprise, the model after which the rest of the world should and must aspire, the great experiment that gives it life in the world at large, is simply betraying the issue that was already present long before America came on to the scene. As a heightened manifestion in its American expression to be sure, but nevertheless already present.
Thus what I find is, when I hear from the american right it’s typically about protecting what is often coined as the great American project or ideal. When I hear from the left, it’s usually the concession that America has somehow neglected or failed in it’s annointed role as the protector of these ideals. Two different ways of building off the same assumptions, both leading me to dig underneath to ask not whether I think either of these things are true about American history and American power (spoiler: I think such assumptions are incredibly ignorant of global history and how Empires work), but whether I think the larger narrative that this arises from is anchored in something true.
So here is where things come tumbling back inwards for me. What if we don’t see this enterprise as the answer? What if we see it as part of the problem? What if we don’t agree with this narrative? What if I question the history it tells? What if I don’t share those values?
As the British neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist says in his celebrated book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, sometimes for some of us to exist here in the West is to feel like a left brained person caught in a right brained (constructed) world (you’ll have to read the book to get the full nuances of his reclamation of that common right/left brain trope).
Which is to say, it can be a lonely place to exist.
Here’s where I might get even a little more bolder. There is no shortage of writers and thinkers echoing some of my sentiments above, but at a grassroots level i might summarize the problem in the following fashion. And I am borrowing somewhat from a recent episode with Rick Steeves, the famous travel writer whom was reflecting on what he has learned from getting to know other countries outside of America’s borders over the years. The ideal of America sounds great when someone is facing oppression, be it in the form of government or social poltical and economic realities. It’s not so great when one has to actually grapple with the so called “liberty” on the other side of this equation.
Which presents an interesting in-road into some of the nuances of this discussion. There is a reigning sentiment throughout the West right now that for as messed up as we see America to be at the moment, that somewhere and somehow the rest of us still have a western ideal to fall back on. One that gets expressed from the vantage point of not being considered the “present Empire,” but that quietly pulls from the echos of our storied history of colonization. The rest of us, as the narrative goes, have that semblance of baseline social structures in place which are the true lifeblood of that western democracy and protect us from the crazy. In some sense this is true. What it fails to see though are the cracks in the larger narrative itself. That’s where the attention really needs to be drawn towards, as that’s where the language of Empire arises from. From that vantage point, I find myself leaning into a book I read last year called My Roman History: A Memoir, in which a historian reflects on her move to Rome to make sense of it’s transition in a time when it had to find it’s identity without the label of Empire or the seat of the Pope. In other words, without the things that afforded it it’s place of superiority in the early growth of that western expansion.
This observation has stuck with me. At one point she observes, as Robert Kaplan also does in The Revenge of Geography, a book also about western expansion, that Empires do the most damage in those periods of time when they have already died but are still living as though they are very much alive (the walking dead imagery abounds here). As both state in their own way, the best thing a fallen Empire can do is come to see itself on the same level as everyone else. And yet rarely, if never, do Empires do this. To a degree we can see this in Britain, but like Rome and now America, they once dug their heels in just as hard. Some of the greatest attrocities inherent to western colonization were birthed from this reality.
There is a larger arc that emerges in this discussion however. And that has to do with all of the Empires that have birthed, given rise to, and seeded the whole Western enterpirse. This is where the particular shape of this resistance comes into play, as it is unique to this moment of history. In many ways, it’s near impossible to break through the conception of America precisely because, as a collective West, we are still convinced that the Western ideal hangs in the balance of that relationship. That’s what really holds us captive. Dig behind that and you have the often unstated, unrealized but wholly apparent assumption that we are somehow on the right side of history as part of the West. Dig further and that’s what holds up this unspoken notion embedded in our narrative that we are, in fact, better than the rest. Morally superior, technologically superior, telling a more enlightened story and upholding the great human endeavor for control through our accomplishments. If not stated overtly, it is what colours so much of what our narrative hands us. To challenge that? To speak about a very real sense of disillusionment with that western enterprise? That western narrative? To find onesself questioning its promises and its validity? That is the thing that becomes impossible.
Thus, that’s what has been on my mind as of late as I muddle my way through books like The Romans: A 2,000 Year History by Edward Watts, Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It by Samuel McDonald, Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations by Carl Fray, to name a few. No answers, perhaps just the feelings of disillusionment as I ponder my past and present relationship to this idea called America. Once upon a time I was free to travel those roads through places that I assumed were just like the rest of us. What I feel these days is a loss of innocence, but a loss that reaches beyond those borders, even as they simitaneously keep coming back to it over and over again.
The Stories of my Life 