For a nation founded and populated by the world’s restless crackpots and malcontents (as well as their slaves), we’re doing better than one might expect.
We’ll likely be seen by whatever civilization succeeds us as industrious people who liked building roads, landing on the Moon, burning witches of various figurative kinds, and following theory and moralism off a cliff. Most of our disagreements involve the higher tiers on Maslow’s Hierarchy, though we fight over those subtle niceties with the ferocity of badgers trapped in a sinking cage.
One of my favorite quotes about the United States (attributed without much evidence to Churchill) is:
Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
Most take that as a backhanded compliment, but if it were up to me, I’d have it stamped on our coins. That sentence captures an endearing quirk of our culture, a tendency to stay in the game long enough to fix our initial mistakes. That span of time can be very long, but our failings nag at (some of) us until we come up with other ill-considered ideas that slowly approximate the right choice.
We’re certainly not afraid of being wrong, and we’re more persistent than smart. Perhaps in the long term that amounts to the same thing.
Our system of government was designed for what we could call “agile development,” the idea of fucking up fast and fixing it before someone important notices. In that fashion, we operate on a clumsy simulacrum of the scientific method: “Oh, shit, that didn’t work. Let’s try something else or at least the same stupid thing in a slightly different way.”
The men who codified that system (assuming we care what they think) would be puzzled at how frequently we cling to the specifics of their beliefs while ignoring the spirit of them. They never expected to become the holy ancestors we worship with a blind reverence that they fought against their entire lives.
Jefferson wrote that:
We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
…and our coat is pretty frayed with sleeves that only reach halfway down our arms like we’re the Incredible Hulk. As much as I’m a “measure twice, cut once” kind of guy, there comes a time when you have to actually do the cutting, take the risk and the action to respond to a changing world with faith that you can fix it.
Once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
Our great American flaw is acting on the world as we want it to be instead of as it is, and our great American strength is our curious tendency to make that work anyway. We could probably shorten that cycle and make it less painful with a clearer perception of reality, but that’s a level of effort we’d rather spread over decades.
In the middle of that slow evolution, we witness all the weird doomed orange-skinned creatures afoot with eyes on the ends of their tusks and fins growing from their necks. They’re shocking and awful and they feel like they’ll be around forever.
They won’t, and neither will we.
None of this is to say that we should patiently wait for justice to arrive. We are all part of the evolution, each of us nudging the good a little further at least to the length of our reach. We’re not a country that’s meant to be satisfied, but it’s easy to confuse dissatisfaction with disaster in the moment.
Sometimes it’s exhausting to exhaust all the alternatives.
