Across the Pond
Authors: Terry Eagleton
ACROSS
the
POND
An Englishman’s View of America
Terry Eagleton
Since I shall have some critical things to say about Americans in this book, as well as some admiring ones, I had better begin by pointing out that some of my best friends are Americans. My wife and three of my children, for example. It is true that they are hardly typical Americans, belonging as they do to that minority of U.S. citizens who have not been abducted by aliens. It is remarkable what bias aliens display in choosing their abductees. For some unfathomable reason, Americans get to be whisked off to other galaxies far more often than, say, Swedes or Slovenes. Perhaps the United Nations might be persuaded to pass a motion deploring this blatant favouritism. It might insist that aliens abduct a more representative sample of the human race, paying due attention to gender, ethnicity and sexual predilection, as well as striking a balance between the developed and less developed parts of the world. Otherwise creatures from outer space are in danger of gaining themselves a reputation as Western supremacists. A more discerning approach of this kind would surely bring the extraterrestrials some scientific benefits. They would, for example, be less likely to conclude that all human beings chew constantly on some kind of sticky substance, or shriek “Oh my God!” every time the visitors venture out of their spacecraft.
I have drawn a good deal in this book on Alexis de Tocqueville’s great study,
Democracy in America
. Its insights into the country can still prove startlingly accurate. Some of its observations, it is true, might strike us today as a little awry. De Tocqueville maintains, for example, that Americans respect the marriage bond more than any other people, and place great trust in their lawyers. Even so, one has to admire the prognostic powers of a man who can write in 1835 that America and Russia “seem called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in [their] hands the destinies of half the world.” Nostradamus never managed anything half as impressive. There are other points where de Toqueville gets things right but the wrong way round. One day, he predicts, North America will be called on “to provide for the wants of the South Americans,” which is not quite the case. It is South Americans who have provided for the wants of North Americans, though de Tocqueville could not be expected to be clairvoyant about neo-colonialism and crack cocaine.
“A foreigner,” writes this supreme observer of American mores, “will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticise something, and that he is absolutely refused.” He finds this “irritable patriotism” the most irritating feature of everyday American life. Charles Dickens thought much the same. It is true that one can still find traces of this touchiness today. Several U.S. publishers were reluctant to take on this book for what one suspects were exactly such reasons. They seem not to have noticed that it is quite as hard on the British as it is on Americans. Some U.S. citizens greet even the mildest European criticism of their country with a raucous reminder that they won the Second World War for us. This is not exactly true, but not all Americans have a knowledge of history to rival a Princeton professor’s. The fact that so many of them say “the eighteen hundreds” rather than “the nineteenth century” suggests that they also have an uncertain grasp of a rather basic arithmetical operation. In general, however, Americans these days are more open to being told of the odd imperfection in their culture than in de Tocqueville’s time. In fact, there are some in the country who are almost pathologically prepared to believe the very worst about themselves. This is to do themselves quite as much an injustice as to boast that they are God’s gift to humanity. But Americans find it hard to do things by halves.
On the Usefulness of Stereotypes
Can one, however, speak of Americans in this grandly generalising way? Is this not the sin of stereotyping, which all high-minded liberals have learnt to abhor? There are, after all, a good many Americans, of various shapes and sizes, and it is hard to see how these millions of unique individuals can be reduced to a single type. Stereotyping is a particularly contentious issue in the United States, largely because of the country’s ethnic divisions. But it is also frowned on because America is probably the most individualist nation on earth, with a firm conviction that every one of its citizens is special. Nobody falls into a general category. Everyone is his or her own elite. As a character in a Henry James novel proudly puts it, “We are all princes here.” The whole nation is a winner. Or at least, those who are not actually winners are en route to becoming so, as an egg is en route to becoming a chicken.
Quite how everyone can be special without nobody being so is a problem we can leave to the logicians. Can everybody really be special, any more than everybody can win the New York Marathon? In a society where everyone is special, being special would seem to be nothing special. It is true that people are unique, in the sense that they are themselves and not somebody else. This, however, is not necessarily a virtue. The Boston Strangler, for instance, would probably have been a great deal better off being someone else. Some Americans might even feel the same about one or two of their recent presidents.
If Americans jealously safeguard their individuality, then this, ironically, is a general fact about them. It is a truth which applies to all these supposedly incomparable individuals, which means that they cannot really be incomparable after all. Besides, if we were not able to stereotype each other with a fair degree of accuracy, social life would grind to a halt. We would not be able to cope with the myriad different situations we encounter if we did not subsume them under certain general categories. There are certain predictable social patterns, such as the iron law which states that in any British café which places salt, pepper, a milk jug and a sugar bowl on each table, there will always be one table where one of these items is missing, and that this table will be your own. Sociologists are not really interested in individuals, any more than Stalinists are, which is one reason why conservatives tend to disapprove of them. They betray the shameful secret that almost everything we do has been done millions of times before, and may well be done millions of times again. The words “I love you” are always at some level a quotation. All language is generalising, including words like “this,” “here,” “unique,” “right now,” and “my utterly special little sweetheart.” The word “individual” originally meant “indivisible,” meaning that to be a person was to be part of a greater whole. There could never be simply one person, any more than there could simply be one letter or one number.
We can deduce an alarming amount about individuals from the sparsest bits of information about them. To know that someone is female is to know that it is possible but unlikely that she will end up running the Pentagon. A child born into the Murdoch dynasty is unlikely to become a Trotskyist. Someone called O’Donovan could probably give a better account of papal infallibility than someone named Rosenheim. People with very small feet tend to know less about ancient history than people with larger feet, since toddlers are less knowledgeable about the topic than adults. Men are far more likely to throw people through windows than women. Black working-class Britons have a far greater chance of becoming mentally ill than Keira Knightley. A regular reader of the British
Guardian
newspaper is unlikely to believe that the solution to gang warfare in the North of England is to detonate a small nuclear weapon over Bradford. People in Butte, Montana, are not typically dandies and aesthetes who lounge languidly around town wearing loose crimson garments and reciting aloud from Dante’s
Purgatorio
, or at least those who do would be well advised to walk warily at night. Wearing fish-net stockings and calling yourself Saucy Sally is not the kind of thing to get you elected governor of South Carolina, not least if you happen to be a man.
Stereotypes are often thought to be negative and demeaning. But this is not always true. Some of them are, while others are anything but. The Irish do not take kindly to being told that they are dirty, idle, feckless, lying, drunken, priest-ridden brawlers, apart from the odd masochist among them who might find this censure a touch too mild. For some mysterious reason, this kind of language tends to make them rather cross. Yet many Irish people are rather gratified to be told that they are genial, charming, witty, eloquent, poetic and hospitable, even though this is just as much of a stereotype. This may not make stereotyping any more acceptable in some people’s eyes, but it complicates the issue. In any case, stereotypes need not deny that we are all distinctive individuals. It is just that, like medical textbooks or prayers for the dying, they focus on what we have in common. To attend only to differences would be as misleading as to see nothing but similarities.
Let us take a case in point. An American friend of mine once confessed to me that he found a certain philosopher rather standoffish. I told him that he had the word almost correct: it wasn’t standoffish, it was Scottish. Scottish men tend to smile less than American men do, a fact that can easily be mistaken for churlishness. In fact, a male Scot will probably smile only faintly if he meets you after a twenty-year absence and you are his mother. On the whole, Scots are less emotionally expressive than Americans, which is not of course to say that they are any less emotional. There is probably more grinning per square yard in Arizona than there is in Aberdeen. Christianity for some U.S. Evangelicals seems to be mainly about grinning. The Gospel is not about being crucified but about being cheerful. Perhaps these people have stumbled on a lost version of the text, with verses such as “A new commandment I give you, that you grin at one another,” or “Grin and it shall be given unto you.” In Presbyterian Scotland, religion is certainly no laughing matter. Scottish unsmilingness has no doubt much to do with John Calvin and John Knox. There is nothing chromosomal about it.
People from Northern Ireland, many of whom are of Scottish descent, are generally less emotionally forthcoming than those from the Irish Republic. They do not typically engage in bouts of surreal wit or zany, slapstick comedy, which is not to say that they are in the least without humour. When it comes to cultural differences between the British and the Americans, it is notable that the British do not generally use your first name on first meeting, though the American habit of doing so is rapidly gaining ground among them. This is partly a matter of reserve, but partly also a fear of being intrusive. When I was an Oxford academic, some of my senior colleagues still addressed me by my second name after twenty years of acquaintanceship. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, my tutor called me Eagleton in my first year, Terence in my second, and Terry in my third. Who knows what teasingly erotic nickname he might have come up with had I stayed an extra year?
Consider these stereotyping statements:
The Irish are funny and friendly.
The British are funny but not friendly.
The Americans are friendly but not funny.
The French are neither funny nor friendly.
What is so offensive about this? The suggestion that there are no funny Americans, friendly French or unfunny Irish? But to call these statements stereotyping is to say that no such suggestion is intended. To think so would be to misunderstand the meaning of a stereotype. To claim that Chicago is a busy city is not to suggest that every square inch of the place is crammed with frenetic activity round the clock, and nobody imagines that it does. “The west of Ireland is wet” does not mean that it rains there all the time, though in fact it rains on average two days out of three. If people have shared roughly the same social and material conditions for long periods of time, it would be astonishing if they did not display certain cultural and psychological features in common. To deny this would be to suggest that their social conditions played no part in their formation, which is by and large a conservative rather than a progressive case. This is all that the phrase “national characteristics” means. It does not imply that Germans are genetically efficient, or that Italians are biologically disposed to making declarations of undying love to women they pass in the street. There is no trace of an ability to brew magnificent beer woven into in the DNA of the Belgians. And there is no doubt that a good many stereotypes are thoroughly offensive.
The same dismissal of social conditions underlies the American Dream. As long as you have enough will-power and ambition, the fact that you are a destitute Latino with a gargantuan drink problem puts you at no disadvantage to graduates of the Harvard Business School when it comes to scaling the social ladder. All you need do is try. It is to the credit of the British that they have rarely fallen for this illusion, a fact illustrated by their saying “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and then for God’s sake give up, there’s no point in making a bloody fool of yourself.”
One reason why so many people end up on death row in the United States is because social conditions are thought to be irrelevant to their behaviour. To plead that the killer was beaten every day of his childhood by a sadistic drug addict of a father is a shameless cop-out. Surely others suffered the same fate yet turned out to be model citizens? This is rather like claiming that because cigarettes do not kill all smokers, they play no part in killing any of them. Some Americans fear that to give social influences their due is to cave in to some kind of social determinism. But this anxiety is quite unreal. To be shaped by social factors is not to be a puppet of them. Freedom does not mean freedom from being conditioned by one’s circumstances. It is only through our circumstances that we pick up the concept of freedom in the first place, as well as how to go about exercising it. A solitary individual would by no means be free. So stereotypes are in need of more defence than they customarily receive. Even so, the discerning reader will note that when I make large generalisations about the British, Irish and Americans in this book, my comments must occasionally be seen as involving a degree of poetic license and a pinch of salt.