The European Dream (5 page)

What most concerns many Europeans is America’s belief that everyone else should conform to the American way of life. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Projects, 79 percent of Americans believe that “it’s good that American ideas and customs are spreading around the world,” while less than 40 percent of Europeans endorse the spread of American ideas and customs.
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What’s particularly interesting in all of these surveys about patriotism, nationalism, and ideas about cultural superiority is that among Europeans and people of other regions around the world, national pride is declining with each successive generation. America is the exception. A whopping 98 percent of American youth report being proud of their nationality, compared with only 58 percent of British youth and 65 percent of German youth.
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Most Americans see these numbers as a positive sign of the vitality of the republic. Many Europeans wonder if America is lost in the past. In a globalizing era where allegiance to country is becoming less important in defining individual and collective identity, the fact that Americans remain so passionately committed to the conventional nation-state political model puts us squarely on the side of traditional geopolitics, but hardly in the vanguard of a new global consciousness.

As long as the majority of Americans find their solace in religious faith and continue to believe that we are a chosen people, looked over and protected by God’s grace, there is little likelihood that our sense of nationalism and patriotism will wane. I don’t mean to suggest that a sense of nationalism has disappeared from the world stage. But, what is clear is that for virtually all of the industrialized nations, and for many developing countries, the nation-state is no longer the only platform for expressing one’s beliefs and convictions and for fulfilling one’s aspirations. The European Dream, as we will see later on in the book, is the first transnational dream to emerge in a global era. If national pride is shrinking in Europe, it’s not for the reason that Europeans are less enamored of their countries but, rather, because their identities and loyalties now reach below and beyond nation-state borders to encompass a richer and more deeply layered sense of embeddedness in the world.

It’s going to be very difficult for Americans to adjust to a borderless world of relationships and flows where everyone is increasingly connected in webs and networks, and dependent on one another for one’s individual and collective well-being. What happens to the American sense of being special, of being a chosen people, in a world where exclusivity is steadily giving way to inclusivity? Does God really care less about the whole of his earthly creation than he does about the North American part? Europeans might find such a conjecture funny, but, believe me, many Americans remain wedded to the notion of our special status as God’s chosen ones. If we were to give up that belief, or even entertain doubt about its veracity, our sense of confidence in ourselves and the American Dream might experience irreparable harm. Frequently, American athletes and celebrities, political leaders and businesspersons say, when interviewed on television, that whatever adversities they have overcome or accomplishments they’ve achieved or successes they’ve enjoyed they owe to their religious faith and God’s grace. I have yet to hear a single European sports figure, celebrity, or political leader make a similar claim.

It should be pointed out that not every immigrant who came to America was inspired to do so because of religious convictions—most did not. While some found religion once they were here, many others never did but were still able to live out the American Dream. Even today, a very sizable minority of Americans are not very religious at all, but they still identify with the American Dream. That’s because the notion of a chosen people has become so pervasive in American culture over the course of the past two centuries that it has shed some of its earlier religious roots and become ingrained in the American psyche.

Religious or not, most Americans believe that we enjoy a special status among nations and peoples. Why is this belief so important? Europeans don’t feel they are a chosen people, and yet they seem able to make their way in the world. But here’s the difference. Europeans often ask me how it is that Americans are always so upbeat about their future. In large part, it’s the idea of being a chosen people that makes us Americans such eternal optimists. We have no doubt that we are destined for greatness, both individually and as a people. It makes us willing to take more risks than other people because we believe that we are being watched over and taken care of and fated to succeed.

Although the idea of being a chosen people has afforded Americans a sense of confidence in our ability to make something of our lives, there is another key element to the American Dream, without which it would never have become so powerful a vision. If John Winthrop represented the spiritual side of the American Dream, it was Benjamin Franklin who provided the practical guidance. Franklin’s vision of America drew its inspiration from the European Enlightenment with its emphasis on materialism, utilitarianism, and individual self-interest in the marketplace. Franklin looked out over the pristine American wilderness and saw vast untapped resources that could be harnessed and made productive. He envisioned America as a kind of grand laboratory for the exploration of science and technology. His idea of the American Dream was a nation of inventive genius, continually engaged in creating wealth and expanding the reach of the marketplace. Franklin favored the utilitarian to the sacred and aspired to create a material cornucopia rather than be delivered up to eternal salvation. His America would be made up of an industrious people grounded in the practical arts.

If Winthrop offered salvation, Franklin offered self-improvement. For every act of revelation, the pioneers were administered a dose of utilitarian rationality, making Americans, at one and the same time, the most fervently religious and aggressively pragmatic of any people on Earth—a status we retain to this very day. Franklin took seriously Thomas Jefferson’s radical claim in the American Declaration of Independence that every human being has an inalienable right not only to life and liberty but also to the pursuit of happiness. No government before that had ever suggested that people might have a right to pursue their own happiness. How does one strive to be happy? Franklin believed that happiness was obtained by ceaseless personal improvement—that is, making something out of oneself.

The American Dream, then, brought together two great European traditions into a sort of grand alliance that, while contradictory on the surface, ignited a vision of human agency more powerful than anything that had previously existed in the annals of human history. While part of the American Dream was to remain focused on Heaven and eternal redemption, the other part of the dream was to remain focused on the forces of nature and the pull of the marketplace. This unique melding of religious fervor and down-home utilitarianism proved a powerful force on the American frontier and later in the building of a highly advanced industrial, urban, and suburban society.

The reason the American Dream has remained so durable is that it speaks to the two most basic human desires—for happiness in this world and for salvation in the next world. The former required perseverance, self-improvement, and self-reliance, and the latter unswerving faith in God. No previous dream offered the prospect of the best of both worlds—the here and now, and the world to come.

While America’s religious commitment remains strong, there is growing evidence that the second component of the American Dream is beginning to weaken. In recent years, a younger generation of Americans seems to have all but eliminated the part of the Declaration of Independence where Jefferson says that everyone has the right “to pursue” happiness, and has, instead, shortened the clause to read that everyone has the right to happiness. Franklin, recall, was forever admonishing the readers of his
Poor Richard’s Almanack
to keep their noses to the grindstone. Franklinesque aphorisms, all of which exhort the virtues of discipline and hard work, have all but been forgotten: “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” “Never put off till tomorrow what can be done today,” “A stitch in time saves nine.” The American Dream was built on the idea that success comes from applying oneself, being resourceful, and becoming self-reliant. Franklin’s proverbs were the last thin threads of what was once a single weave uniting a secular utilitarianism of the Enlightenment with the older Calvinist religious tradition, what Max Weber later referred to as “the Protestant work ethic.” (We will discuss the Reformation theology in more detail in chapters 4 and 5.) Today, a growing number of younger Americans have broken with the work ethic. For them, the American Dream has less to do with faith and perseverance and more to do with luck and chutzpah.

One of the most intriguing public opinion polls I’ve come across, in all of the years of looking at such surveys, asked young people under the age of thirty whether they believe they will become rich. Fifty-five percent of all young people answered affirmatively, believing that they would become rich.
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One might suspect that of young Americans. Don’t forget, the Horatio Alger stories—that it’s possible for every American to go from “rags to riches”—is what the American Dream is all about. But what was really fascinating about the survey was the follow-up question. When asked how they would acquire such riches, 71 percent of those who were employed believed that there was no chance that they would get rich by their current employment.
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Well, what about future employment prospects? It turns out that an overwhelming 76 percent of young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believe that, regardless of the job one has, Americans are not “as willing to work hard at their jobs to get ahead as they were in the past.”
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I assume they are including themselves among the lot.

When
Newsweek
conducted this survey, it asked whether it was likely the respondents would become rich, if not by their work, then by investments, inheritance, or good luck. As to investments, the poll was done in 1999, when the bull market was supercharged and investors were recording record gains on their stocks. No longer. Inheritance is a possibility, but most of the baby-boom generation is awash in debt and not likely to be able to pass on a fortune—at least not enough to cover the 55 percent of young people who believe they are going to be rich.
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That leaves us with luck. All of these categories—investment, inheritance, and luck—require little in the way of hard work and perseverance, the kind of qualities Franklin had in mind as the quintessential virtues for getting ahead in America. My own suspicion is that a lot of kids think they are just going to be lucky. It will somehow come to them without having to work hard for it.

I’m reminded of a book written by the late social critic Christopher Lasch—which he entitled
The Culture of Narcissism.
It was Lasch’s contention that the consumer ethos had gained such a deep hold on the American psyche that most Americans, and especially the young, are drowning in momentary pleasures and trivial pursuits. He writes: “The pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival. . . . To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessor or posterity.”
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Shortly after Lasch’s analysis, the late New York University educator Neil Postman published his own account of America’s wayward narcissism in a book entitled
Amusing Ourselves to Death
. Both of these keen observers of American culture worried that younger Americans were increasingly caught up in a media culture that sold the idea of instant gratification of one’s desires. The result was that each successive generation of Americans was less willing or even less able to work hard and postpone gratification for future rewards. The narcissist’s temporal frame is immediate and self-centered. Past commitments and future obligations are considered unnecessary restraints and impediments to instant gratification. In this new culture of narcissism, everyone feels entitled, and far less willing to put off happiness until tomorrow. America’s $330 billion advertising industry is relentless in its pursuit of the idea that you and I can have everything that we desire now. Why wait? To ensure that end, America has sported a consumer credit-card culture that allows us to enjoy now and pay later. Many Americans are living well beyond their means and awash in consumer debt—all of which perpetuates the narcissistic behavior that Lasch and Postman noticed was sweeping fast into American life.

Has the American Dream descended from its once lofty peak where it combined Christian eschatology with Enlightenment utility and rational behavior, and just become a dream of having good luck? Apparently, for a growing number of Americans, the answer is yes.

Americans have always been risk-takers. That’s part of what the American Dream is all about. We used to associate American risk-taking with the willingness to start over in a new land, tame a wilderness, invest in an idea, or start a new business. Today, for a growing number of Americans, risk-taking has been reduced to little more than gambling.

In 2002, seven out of ten Americans engaged in some form of legal gambling. Fifty-seven percent of Americans purchased a lottery ticket in the past year, and 31 percent of Americans gambled in casinos.
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The annual growth rate of American gambling has been a steamy 9 percent in the past decade, which means that gambling has been growing significantly faster than the U.S. economy as a whole.
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Americans are now spending more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined.
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In 2002, Americans spent $68 billion on legal gambling at racetracks, at casinos, and on lotteries, compared to $27 billion in 1991.
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When I was a child, in the 1950s, only the state of Nevada allowed gambling. Today, forty-seven states have legalized gambling. The states raise more than $20 billion from lotteries and casinos, or more than 4 percent of their total revenue.
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