An Ending To The United States
Do not misunderstand me. I love my homeland deeply. But, that love is not blinding. My eyes are open. I am critical and demanding of the national story we tell ourselves. am driven to understand the truth of the United States before any emotionally delectable fable. That yearning to understand what we really are tempers any blinding love of homeland I might have. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, I’d rather face the hard truth than wallow ignorantly in a comfortable myth. If I stand in that fact-finding light long enough, I start to feel like I’m standing on objective grounds.
In such a fact-finding light, I willingly recast our culture as multiple instead of singular. I see the United States as wounded and not almighty, as a grand imperial experiment containing the beating hearts of many reluctant, excited, troubled nations. The United States is like a great ship being pulled through the water by invisible lines of tribalism that reach back to the foundations of humanity, resisting all the way, struggling desperately against the force of our own human natures. We are, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, an ‘empire of liberty.’ We were born in contradiction.
But, the objectivity of that fact-finding light is an illusion. Like all art, it is an illusion that can sometimes paradoxically reveal truth. I can see some of the contours of what the US is, as a member of this great culture — many thinking people can see some of those contours. But, what we see is an incomplete picture. We cannot so easily see the full form of the United States any more than a fish can see the form of the water. Understanding the United States and being the United States are positions often in contradiction of one another. That is true of any culture, in any time or place. The very medium of culture, the one great evolutionary tool of humanity, both clouds and reveals simultaneously. Try as I will to see the contours more clearly, I still am, and will forever be, a perpetuating member of US culture. Objectivity may be impossible. I may never be able to see the form form of the US. My ‘objectivity’ is both naive and arrogant.
So, if understanding the United States from within is a contradiction, even perhaps a Sisyphean effort, why try at all? Because, new things can be understood. New truths can be revealed. We may not see the full contours of the shape of the United States as it currently is, but we can reveal more and more of that form. We can understand it better. Indeed, this is the very driving forces of anthropology and the social sciences, to understand human culture even if we are that culture. Objectivity mired in subjectivity. Humanity, not just the United States, is born in contradiction.
As I was reared in this particular imperial culture, no matter how much objectivity and understanding I can gather, I cannot fully turn away from my love of the United States. I am still invested in the story the United States tells itself because it is the story of me. Even if, hypothetically, I packed bags for Peru or Papua, I would still keep brain cells tuned in dedication to the US experiment. I want to believe that innovations in democracy will continue, that the arc of justice and reason will still bend towards light, that it is possible that the American experiment will succeed. If I am so biased to the US, perhaps my love of country is simply a love of me and my story. The culture of the United States is the first true cultural framework I ever knew and it is thoroughly interwoven into my physical being.
However, we are not always in control of the story. Despite the United States being a democracy, larger forces often drive the narrative. The thing about human cultures is that they not only change, but change in ways we can’t predict. This is as true of the United States as it is for Nigeria or New York chess culture or HTML. An idea that centralizes a culture will inevitably shift so that something like ‘love of one’s country’ will be quaintly replaced by love of a style of drumming, or attached around an animated gif, or reformed around a graphic novel that is, right now, birthing new styles of religion. Culture is impulse — no one is in control. And the cultural impulses of nationalism and spirituality, of hunger, desire, fear, and the rest cannot be denied. Like an open fire hose, those natural human feelings gush forth , forcing the shape of culture to change shape wildly and continuously. The story we tell ourselves will change. The United States of America will change. Sometimes a voice as small as mine can contribute. Most of the time it cannot. And yet, I still care about the outcome. My objectivity and subjectivity cloud together in a swirl. I want to know the truth about the United States, yet I am subjectively tied to its story, cheering it on.
Will the Trump Insurrection of January 6th, 2021 matter in a hundred years? I doubt it. It will become a footnote in history, the way that Bacon’s Rebellion or the revolution of Teotihuacan or the rise of Bengali science fiction has become. Nevertheless, it matters to me in the here and now because the US story is my story. It feels as if the story our culture tells itself is about to end. And more than jealousy or rage or love, more than fear or reason…the purest, deepest, most profound of human impulses, that of being pulled along by a good story, is most central of all to the human experience. The fact that a story that centralizes every human life, every human culture across space and time, is the one constant in our human universe.
And I don’t want the story of the United States of America to end right now.
