New Ethic - The Wild West Horror Show

[[INTRODUCTION]]

GENERAL

Why This Work Is Needed

Human society has an intricate communications system, some of whose code is universally understood. However, the intelligibility of most signs and signals is limited, for instance, by the particular language we speak and the area where we live. Staying within our native culture, we do not as a rule fully realize that we are constantly qualifying what we see or hear depending on the source generating it. I may know from experience that my neighbor is a pessimist, that another acquaintance is a braggart, that the corner haberdasher tends to overestimate his merchandise, and I almost unconsciously add to or subtract from their statements accordingly. As an insider, I have a key, although of course I am liable to make mistakes here and there. A classic example of the difference between fact and what is acknowledged to be the case is that principles officially subscribed to by a government are never the same as those actually practiced. The former Soviet Union had one of the most humanitarian constitutions ever devised, yet it had a dismal human-rights record. Many Western European intellectuals who had been inspired by Marx’s maxim of “jeder nach seiner Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen” (from all according to their ability to all according to their need) had to learn this difference from bitter experience.

We may thus say that communications governing the conduct of a given community are in code, and that much of that code is closed to the outsider. Visitors and immigrants need a key to decipher the code that regulates the functioning of the land they travel to/are adopting in positive correlation to the degree it differs from their own and, even more crucially, to the degree that its acknowledged ethos differs from the real one. The present work is accordingly addressed, for one, to the visitor or immigrant. Since in the “new world order” the United States dominates, more than ever “we are the guys,” and unilateralism reigns, it is addressed to the world at large as well: it can serve not only as a survival kit for the outsider in the US but for all outsiders and undesirables, meaning potentially the rest of humanity. On the global scale, USA versus the world, it is the rest of humanity that actually suffers from an information gap. Last but not least, as already mentioned, natives can be duped as well, and to that extent I am addressing myself to all Americans in good faith.

Of course it is only too human to wish to be duped. Act utilitarians might argue that ignorance is bliss. I once read an article in a Seattle paper where the author noted with an unmistakable tone of exasperation that some Asian immigrants appear not to understand the racial slurs flung at them. I reflected that they are perhaps better off not knowing American English. Failing to understand the slurs, innuendos, and obscenities provides a certain shield. Sometimes I wish I had never learned some of the words and expressions used by the people of this country, particularly their obscene metaphorical senses. They are degrading, and they intrude on my memory no matter how much I wish I could expunge them. Yet for the permanent resident sooner or later the shield of ignorance is liable to be pierced. Americans traveling in foreign countries sometimes describe themselves as innocents abroad, but foreigners visiting the United States can be innocents from abroad. If they want to fit into their new environment, they have to shed their innocence, even if the process causes lasting damage, and despite the risk that it will eventually disable them.

A work like this always has a double edge, as it describes and thereby discloses tactics that can be learned and practiced in turn by the reader, used against others as much as defend and protect from others. By providing a precedent, people who commit a new type of abuse degrade humanity at large. This is the old problem and paradox of what constitutes legitimate defense.

Considering that this country has a common language with Britain, traces its traditions to an English colony, and cherishes an image as an upholder of democratic values, its civilization differs from European civilization more than one might suppose. I was once somewhat surprised when a British-born student at Washington State University told me that the mentality of a Turk was much closer to him than that of an American. This difference is diminishing as the world becomes Americanized, but is at present still considerable.

The United States: Image Versus Reality

From a semiotic perspective, we can say that a key to the communications code of the US and within that the American West is needed and largely missing. I submit the following considerations.

I shall start with the approach of using a dictionary as a means of trying to decipher the American scene. Standard general dictionaries do not include many slang, argotic, vulgar, or obscene terms and expressions and fail to define the vulgar, obscene, etc. metaphorical meanings that many standard words and expressions have in US usage. Particularly Western American civilization is built on innuendo; words, phrases, expressions have insinuatory meanings that dictionaries cannot be expected to provide. Many nonverbal signs and signals, such as used in body language, are peculiar to it. The interpretation of nonverbal languages is indispensable for dealing with Western American culture not only because many Westerners are relatively inarticulate but principally because, their ways being covert, they often prefer them to verbal expression. Other than body language (e. g., gestures, facial expressions, attitudes), these include vocalizations (grunts, yells, laughter, etc.), noises (slamming, banging, shooting, horn tooting), and even light signals (headlights, porch lights, searchlights). Some types of make-believe: fabrications, tricks, games, clowning, and other odd acts are distinctive to them and can confound the uninitiated. Moreover, words, phrases, signs, signals, or body language often have the opposite meaning from the surface or ostensible meaning because, in fact, they are intended to mislead and deceive; they are traps. Whether verbal or nonverbal, such signals, etc. may be said to be parasitical on the original meanings. Some of these of course exist in other cultures as well, while some are spreading abroad.

Now let us turn to another, very important instrument in forming a picture of American civilization: the media. On the whole, the US and especially Western US mass media–Hollywood being the great image factory—show a distorted picture of this country. The image of the US as mirrored in its media has some factual correspondences with reality. There are newspapers, television programs, and internet sources that provide accurate information within certain limits. The media nevertheless are spreading a substantially false message. This image is dangerous just because there is truth in it, which may serve as a sort of bait. Inasmuch as it can be considered propaganda, it is a far better one than the crudely mendacious materials put out by some dictatorships. Certain countries, militantly opposed to the US, paint a grossly unrealistic picture that in effect helps US “propaganda” (I am of course using this word in a very broad sense), which has at least a semblance of being unbiased and objective. For example, the Iraqi Minister of Information under Saddam was clearly a clown. Gross misinformation, such as disseminated by Kim’s North Korea, tends to backfire in the long run, because borders cannot be hermetically sealed in the twenty-first century. US media concoct a brew in which truth and falsehood are much more subtly commingled.

Just like the propaganda efforts of various petty dictatorships today, Soviet propaganda was more grossly inaccurate than the US media have ever been. But the Soviet state is defunct. The last powerful regime that to a limited degree still abides by the policies of Soviet-style communism and keeps a tight lid–resulting in an arrant distortion of the truth–on its media, China, is in the grip of change and will probably undergo a substantive transformation in the not-too-distant future. By contrast, fundamentalist and/or extremist religion is on the rise worldwide. It too tends to be blatantly distortive of fact; in addition, it is often violent and incites to violence. Unfortunately, the fundamentalist tide has not spared this country either, although our variety may be less sanguinary than some others. Fundamentalist ideas animate certain policies of the George W. Bush administration.

It is far from me to propose that the US media are unique in twisting the truth. Moreover, the means of communication devised by human civilization have always been used in part to mislead. Signals, speech, folklore, oral or written literature are no exception. This culture may have taken the lead in such areas as commercialization, commodification, the apotheosizing of media performers, the staging of politics, war, and other fields of human endeavor. But it is an important point that, further, this country has become the hyperpower at least in the military sphere and has lately started to act unilaterally, withdrawing from treaties and bypassing the United Nations; it has thrown its weight around trying to split the European Union; it has threatened and initiated war. World domination never previously known could be the result. People all over the globe are awed by this power, so that the media, which are, to some degree, the US’s propaganda arm–on a much wider scale than just government propaganda–exercise a numbing influence.

[Something about the Internet might be in order here.]

A further factor that can contribute to fogging the truth is that by and large in their daily discourse the American people themselves tend to paint an idealized picture of the United States. This is particularly the case with less educated members of society. I will discuss these and other aspects of the semiotic comprehensibility gap in detail below.

Some Differences between the European and American Ethoi

It is not entirely correct that “this country is the envy of the world,” but it is the envy of many. If we consider the appalling sanitary and housing conditions, nutritional deficiencies, ignorance, political oppression, and threat to personal safety that must be endured by countless millions on this planet, criticism of the US may well seem hollow. As the saying goes, people vote with their feet. Which are the countries from where people flee, as opposed to those they seek? The statistics speaks more eloquently than arguments. People risk their lives and pay considerable sums of money to enter this country illegally. “Get out of here, and take me with you” is how a British MP summed up the attitude of rabid anti-Americans.

On the other hand, the consumer society functions at the cost of enormous waste, the depletion of the earth’s resources, environmental damage, pollution, and frequently the exploitation of workers in other parts of the world. Also, the opulence that draws people to this country tends to be exaggerated. For example, the living standards of families shown on TV series as average are rather those of the privileged. Immigrants from countries that are poor and/or have oppressive governments gain a great deal in terms of survival and creature comforts by settling over here, and many of them must feel that the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks, which they may even find trivial. Yet some of the trappings of wealth and some of the status symbols are entirely superfluous, frequently even harmful, and produce an unquenchable appetite rather than lasting satisfactions.

The great waves of European immigrants to the US came from the ranks of the poor and uneducated. Moreover, they belonged to the unwanted “surplus,” often regarded by the governments of their countries of provenance as a burden swelling the numbers of the unemployed and those that have to be fed at public expense. This is not to deny that over the years immigrants have arrived on these shores for many different reasons. The cases of those who came to escape religious, ethnic, and political persecution as well as those who wished to establish ideal communities are well known and much publicized. Of course some, such as the blacks who were brought here as slaves, and children brought over with their families, had no choice in the matter. However, economic advantage probably weighed more heavily than spiritual, moral, or civic values in the motivation of the numerically preponderant part of the immigrants. In addition to those who simply wished to improve their lot by working, the US attracted many shiftless adventurers. It was not uncommon for a family to get rid of a scion who acted as a loose cannon by sending him overseas. The events of the gold rush provide an example for the motivation and mores of a certain type of immigrant. Ever since the rise of National Socialism, political refugees fleeing oppressive governments have been numerous, but in recent decades the motivational emphasis has again shifted back to economic grounds.

This civilization is the revenge of Europe’s lower classes, a proletarian paradise in a sense, but one that would not have made Marx happy any more than the erstwhile Soviet Union would. A rough and necessarily imprecise yet helpful way to contrast Europe with the US is to say that the former used to have an elitist, class system, while the latter has been an egalitarian, classless one. The terms elitist, populist, class, and classless apply here with considerable limitations and caveats, as explained below. But whether we look at customs, manners, colloquial usage, entertainment, or political campaigns, the impression that they are aimed at and/or produced by what corresponded to the unlettered, plebeian stratum of society in Europe, the hoi polloi, is striking.

The “unwashed masses” constituted the vast majority of Europe’s population until comparatively recent times. The system was maintained by their labor and in turn exploited and ill-treated them. It barred them from educational opportunities and called them ignorant; skimmed off the profits of their toil that might have assured them decent living conditions and disdained them for being dirty and slatternly; forced them to perform backbreaking and demeaning chores and then derided them for being clumsy and rough, etc. In medieval times even bourgeois literature was characterized by coarseness and bawdiness as opposed to the refined, elevated tone of aristocratic literature, while folklore was not regarded as deserving any notice whatsoever. Though it has undergone vast changes and is now overall providing better educational, health, retirement, and housing benefits to its citizens than the US, European society has kept some of its class and elitist frame. Its customs, manners, language usage, literature, and art have tended to upgrade to the level of the educated rather than “dumb down” to the unlearned. This does not hold across the board; for instance, British punk rock can successfully compete with the US variety in brutality, vulgarity, and inarticulateness; conversely, there is, for example, increasing skepticism even in European academic circles regarding the validity of traditional literary canons, and thereby doubt concerning some of the conventional criteria upon which the notion of education rests.

To qualify US society as egalitarian and populist from its inception is a considerable overgeneralization and would be quite incorrect in the absolute sense, but here I am dealing with it in comparison with traditional European society, and in this respect the characterization holds. Since those who were well off or otherwise had a privileged status in their native lands were on the whole least motivated to migrate, the great majority who came belonged the lower classes in an even greater proportion than the average percentage of those classes in the respective lands. In the US they found an ambiance that, instead of being condescending about or downright contemptuous of their cultural standards, legitimized them. (Of course many nationalities were subjected to discrimination–here I am merely talking about their cultural level being approved.) This was in accord with the political philosophy and mentality that shaped this country since its founding. I must reiterate that I am taking the bird’s-eye view, and therefore what I state has many exceptions. For one thing, there was an important elitist trend and faction in political ideology during the first hundred years of the republic; for another, many of the leaders of those times were themselves intellectuals. I am speaking of this country not in absolute terms but in contradistinction to Europe. In the United States best-selling literature, the popular arts, and entertainment have traditionally been derivative of and/or suggest the spirit of the country fair, circus show, amusement park, revival meeting, dime novel, penny dreadful, and scandal sheet.

Yet the Puritanism and the so-called protestant ethic, which contributed to the ethos of the first colonial settlements, continued to exercise their influence, restricting the choice of both subject matter and treatment. This influence extended to the areas of customs, manners, and speech as well. Being at the start a handmaiden of religion, the educational system generally upheld those standards until comparatively recent times. At school and in public administration “proper” terms were used to describe activities related to such touchy subjects as bodily functions or sex, while in colloquial usage vulgar words prevailed, unless the topics themselves were shunned altogether. That which in America went for officially approved and recognized has a certain resemblance to the European elitist scheme, but with very important differences and breadth of applicability according to the specific domain in question. Thus the cult of mediocrity–the average representing the approved, the norm to be followed–which is germane to the American concept of democracy, US egalitarianism, and antiaristocratic/antiroyalist sentiment, going hand in hand with the fact that the vast majority of the population had a lower-class and not infrequently criminal background, resulted in the leveling off, actually lowering of standards of intellectual content, sensibility, and refinement in the media, including television, radio, the press, music, theater, and popular literature as well as outside the media in the realms of colloquial speech, customs, and manners, creating what is in many respects a classless society. At the other end of the scale, however, partly as a fruit of the protestant ethic, living standards have improved dramatically. The outcome has been a sort of proletarian promised land (or at least what the lower classes hoped would be such before actually experiencing it), a revenge and triumph of the masses that had been oppressed and ridiculed by the elitist European system. Plebeian and vulgar taste–though with many notable limitations and exceptions owing to the puritan, academic, and other elements entering into the mix–has been sanctioned and vindicated.

Although many of the features of indigence have been eliminated and generally living standards have skyrocketed over the past century, from other points of view, namely wealth and income, this is not a classless society at all, and if we take wealth as a criterion, class differences have even increased of late. Ironically this culture on the one hand exalts the average and commonplace, which sometimes come down to the gross, garish, and crude, while on the other hand it operates with cutthroat competitiveness and aggressiveness. Although ethnicity, religion, and the number of generations to which one can trace back one’s American ancestry retain a certain relevance, in the US class status is most customarily expressed in dollar terms. In 1950, on my initial first-hand contact with this country, I was still baffled by this. In the Europe I had known, class distinctions based on nobility had greatly faded. Whatever remained of them, having mostly a snobbish tinge, no longer necessarily connoted wealth, as impoverished aristocrats were quite common. The bourgeoisie–a term that rather inadequately translates into middle class–was still a fairly well-definable category, and belonging to it meant a certain distinction. Yet its prestige had been progressively undermined, most decisively by the socialists, who pointed out the unfairness of the entire traditional class system in which the bourgeoisie, particularly its upper stratum, the industrialists and financiers, held a privileged place. From another direction, the bourgeois had long come under fire by artists, poets, the literati, and unconventional people of all types for their smug, materialistic, and narrow-minded outlook. Needless to say, wealth conferred prestige on you; having money was a source of pride, envy, and admiration, and obviously there were various other yardsticks—ethical superiority, rank in the army or civil service, inherited landed property, political prominence, business acumen, etc. –by which one could measure excellence, merit, or status, yet European elitism, in probably the most distinctive use of the term, centered around the concept of the intellectual at the time I am dealing with.

Here we come up against another term whose trans-Atlantic, particularly Continental meaning is still not clearly grasped by most Americans. A while, shall we say, a year after my arrival in this country, my Fordham classmates started to compliment me on the strides I was making in adjusting to US society. One of them, comparing what I had been when I got off the boat to this new, improved version of me, said, “...and now your are an intellectual!” I thought that, if anything, I had become less of one, but made no comment, reflecting sadly that the progress I was making in becoming Americanized was measured by most of my classmates in terms of my learning such words as bullshit or fuck. I relate this little incident merely to illustrate that intellectual is a murky word to the majority of the American public. To the person in question it connoted something positive, synonymous with educated.

However, the bulk of the references to intellectual I subsequently heard from others in my new milieu was disapproving. Just what did the word signify to them? Presumptuousness, I guess, condescension but, more fundamentally, not being a regular guy, someone who wants to be different, a “queer” –so we are back with the idea of the leveling effect of American culture, mass culture, phalanx (in a free-enterprise phalanstery, though). The word seemed to appear more frequently modified by the prefix pseudo than without it. Dick, my roommate, told me, “My father calls them people educated beyond their intelligence.” It turns out that his dad was actually quoting Columbia University’s Brander Matthews, verbatim. Intellectual has an un-American ring, and when one comes across it having to do with Americans, one is given to understand that they are not quite the genuine article, such as “New York intellectuals.” Conversely, the intelligentsia in the United States stand in the somewhat unusual position of being by and large critical and dismissive of the culture of the very nation they belong to.

Intellectual in the acception it is still often employed particularly in Continental Europe refers to a person devoted to matters of the mind primarily in the arts, letters, and philosophy, or more broadly the humanities. In this context you can talk about a theoretical physicist or astronomer who is not an intellectual. The elitism built on the superiority of the intellectual (if the word excludes even the theoretician working in physical science or mathematics) is therefore in some respects an outdated conception, as I was in fact beginning to recognize already in my early adolescence. This is the age of science. Yet the arts, letters–and by these understand the highbrow variety–and philosophy continue to “matter” in Europe even to this day more than the majority of Americans can possibly appreciate.

The division of literature and the arts into high(brow) and low(brow), serious and light, deep and superficial, or genuine and kitsch decidedly has an element of the arbitrary in it but, especially broadening our survey to the humanities in general, it would be untenable to maintain that there is no difference in level, quality, or value between the works of, say, Aristotle, Russell, Mozart, Beethoven, Leonardo, Monet, Flaubert, or Tolstoy on the one hand and the sort of book-form “advice” product, rock music, greeting-card design, or crime fiction that have respectively the greatest appeal to the public in this country on the other hand. US civilization in many respects “dumbs down,” while the elitist European approach has tended to raise the level of the public.

Meanwhile the European system is no longer elitist in the old sense; for example, higher education is largely free, admission being geared to talent and application, and healthcare coverage is universal as well as generally of high quality. In the US the leveling-off effect encompasses, besides the humanities, broad areas of customs, manners, and speech, with the result that a billionaire, who belongs to the highest class based on the most frequently applied ranking, that according to wealth, is on pretty much the same level as a member of the lower-middle class in perhaps the most important respects. They will speak the same language, have similar preferences in sports, art, and entertainment, and if they read at all, it may be the same type of literature. Moreover, since preferences in these various categories reflect the personality of a human being, resemblances actually go much deeper, to acting and reacting with respect to the main issues confronting one in life, their motivations and goals, their behavior patterns as well as the ethical norms they subscribe to in theory and those they follow in practice. The billionaire may have a mansion, yacht, private plane, and golf course and even shun or have contempt for the poor, yet his intellectual and moral horizon might not extend farther than his caretaker’s.

Since I have stated that being an intellectual, inasmuch as the term is used with a preponderantly arts-and-letters emphasis, may be an obsolete model in an age of science, I must at least sketchily touch on that very complex problem. Highbrow literature and fine arts have entered a crisis phase since around 1900 at the latest, for one thing because, if it is the sine qua non of art to create something original, instead of a copy, a repetition of what has already been done–as the word create itself implies–with the passing of time they had to find more and more extraordinary modes of expression. Art as imitation was definitively out when photography and the motion picture were invented, and the status of literature as an attempt to portray the deepest stirrings of the human psyche or an authentic image of life was weakened by the development of specialized branches of science (the claim being that, e. g., sociology deals with social questions more competently than a sociological novel). As a result of the attempt to discover innovative avenues of expression, fiction and the fine arts have tended to get unhinged–become prohibitively difficult of approach, dehumanized (as in abstract art), or scandalous (to challenge conventional canons of taste).

If we include the humanities as part of the purview of the intellectual, we still wind up in our net with sciences that are “soft,” i. e., not exact. These disciplines have also been somewhat on the defensive and have either tried to gain prestige by solidifying the links that connect them with the exact sciences or, on the contrary, gone on a counteroffensive with fanciful terms, arcane jargons, or wild hypotheses to make up for their lack of rigor and to generate interest–among the latter are some directions in postmodernism, deconstruction, hermeneutics, semiotics, postprocessual archeology, and cultural anthropology. But the real winners in this respect have been the hard or exact ones, natural science, mathematics, and branches of knowledge that genuinely lend themselves to being quantified or applied to technological innovation.

The net result of the arts, humanities, and some branches of science going “nutty” has been that they shot themselves in the foot; they have further and unnecessarily discredited their fields. The fact that significant aspects of, for example, sociology or psychology cannot at this point, in the foreseeable future, or perhaps ever be completely experimental, verifiable, predictive, or exact does not mean that we can dismiss and forget about them, because problems relating to society and the human mind impinge on us and demand to be answered, even if it has to be on a speculative or putative basis. And as for the arts and letters are concerned, the very fact that conditions and circumstances as well as the means of communication keep changing in our world provides continually new possibilities and challenges. Fiction and art have, by their nature, potentials that cannot be made superfluous by advances in science or technology.

The considerations above indicate that the concept of the intellectual retains a certain validity, albeit probably with some modifications of its characteristic twentieth-century European usage. In my eyes a theoretical physicist immersed in the study of the forces of the universe may be referred to as an intellectual irrespective of whether he has happened to read Kant or Valéry. Speculative theoretical work, particularly in physics, astrophysics, quantum field theory, and astronomy, but also in biology and some other disciplines, can confer a breadth of view, a vision, and connote dedication that correspond to the essence of what I take to be the intended purport of the term. I would even venture to say that at that level science becomes a sort of poetry which is often superior to what poets–in the usual sense of that word–do.

Soon after arriving in this country I realized that, even in the groves of Academe, describing oneself as an intellectual might translate into cisatlantic English as snob, and I would take pains to explain that what I basically meant was, more than anything else, an attitude: being given to serious reflection on general questions and pursuits that develop distinctively human faculties. Furthermore, the liberal arts provide for thoughtful people a frame of reference in communication. Such considerations, rather than the naive notion that “great” books and works of art represent certified pinnacles of achievement, authenticate the function of the arts and humanities. This still fairly stands for my opinion on the matter. The attitude of listening to a musical composition, for example, is an integral part of the experience; conversely, the style, manner, orchestration, instrumentation, etc. change the appeal, the very qualia of the piece in question. All this is baby talk in terms of reception theory (Rezeptionästhetik), but here I have to be content with suggesting a bare outline of the issue.

A string theorist dedicated to his/her discipline deals with reality more than the rest of us could ever hope to, yet paradoxically in the US he/she is cut off from social reality inasmuch as he/she does not share the popular culture. As the saying goes, the college campus is not part of the real world. The–generally still highbrow–culture that institutions of higher learning promote in the US is a suspect foreign import grafted unto the body of Americanism like the ibis’s head of Thoth would be on the Statue of Liberty. This is one important motive for undergraduates to reject it: they fear becoming geeks. American culture (i. e., the academic variety) is not the culture of America (i. e., the public ethos). The humanities over here do not supply a frame of reference by which to communicate. Hollywood, football, automobiles, and guns do. In Europe highbrow culture represents the common intellectual currency of many and usually commands respect; in the US it is on the way out and usually elicits ridicule. I am of course greatly simplifying this. Scores of factors enter into the shaping of cultural preferences over here and abroad. Some are common to global industrialization and therefore give rise to similar developments in Europe, the US, and elsewhere. There is, for instance, an–in my view legitimate–European as well as American trend pointing out the artificiality of certain prejudicial a priori distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow. Some factors are due to the global impact of the US media, which is a gigantic one. And some American influences come back from abroad on the rebound. If the triumph of Elvis was the revenge of Europe’s exploited and disdained lower classes, the success of the Beatles in this country was Britain getting even with us for Elvis.

To a considerable extent, Academia in the US has opposed not only the popular culture but more broadly the spirit of commercialism, social injustice, inequity, the excesses of capitalism, and intolerance. It had been a long-standing grievance of the right that college profs are liberals, progressives, commies, whatever. During the nineteen fifties I would often hear them add: but, lo and behold, graduates don’t follow in the footsteps of their liberal-leaning teachers; they are not duped by those screwed-up eggheads. Yet student sentiment in the sixties and seventies turned anti-establishment (though not highbrow). It is remarkable that the most prestigious universities are private; they operate on funds furnished by endowments established by capitalists; nevertheless, their faculties have tended to sympathize with the political left. This is a tribute to the broad-mindedness of the donors, the integrity of the faculty members, and the guarantees of personal freedom that in certain areas obtain in the system. Unfortunately in recent times a much more direct corporate involvement and sway as well as commercialism on a broad range have made themselves felt inside the halls of academe; the ideological orientation and allegiance of the students may be changing, it is still in the balance–the future will tell.

The academic environment has offered a shelter of comparative gentility and independence (comparative because internecine warfare, pressures and stresses from students, community, and administrators as well as profitability considerations, to mention just a few matters, have increased) to people who do not want to join the fray of the commercial and mercilessly competitive outside world. But our hypothetical string theorist, single-mindedly dedicated to and deeply interested in his field of study, is actually a rare phenomenon on the American campus. The majority of the faculty, particularly at institutions of lesser status, are not devoted to their jobs, drift in and out of the profession according to prevailing opportunities and, most to the point, seem to have a casual relationship to the subjects they teach. I used to be puzzled when department members would declare that they wished to eschew “talking shop”–by which they meant discussing their supposedly chosen fields. The phrase is, I think, unmistakably American as applied to academic life. I cannot picture any true scholar or scientist apologize for discussing her or his subject with confreres any more than I can imagine a televangelist apologize for bringing up the subject of salvation. A shoe salesman might be disinclined to discuss shoe styles or bunions after hours, but commitment to art and science ought to be a vocation. The instructor for whom teaching is a job and the student for whom the course is a credit requirement may surely be found in any land; however, they are endemic to the US not merely because Americans are alien to what is supposed to be their own culture but because, with few exceptions, they have no profound interests any more than deep convictions or what I discern as true character. It is for these reasons that, while the American educator is somewhat of a stranger in his/her own nation, he/she rarely quite fills the bill as a European’s idea of the scholar either.

I stated above that mathematics and exact science have been the real winners. This was in the context of higher education inasmuch as it is considered a search for and imparting of reliable knowledge concerning the world we live in. Of course postmodernism rejects the privileged position of any branch of learning and recognizes, instead, only different types of discourse having relative validity without the possibility of a unified organization or theory of knowledge. In my judgment the postmodern epistemological position–although I do not dispute that some postmoderns have brilliant insights and are inspired by humane social and political views–represents a hopeless rear-guard action and will in the main further discredit and marginalize the humanities. Deconstructionists may vaunt their sophistication in refusing to acknowledge any objective criteria for truth, but since time out of mind totally unlettered cheats and liars have made a practice of what deconstructionists preach on the matter.

In the meantime, science marches on. The United States is up front in offering higher education in the fields of science and engineering. The response of young Americans is not proportionate to the opportunity offered them, because the curricula demand grueling work, which they are averse to. Yet even the restricted number of scientists who carry on truly innovative theoretical and research work suffice to keep this country in the vanguard. In addition, foreign students flock to the States to take advantage of the slack, making up an astonishingly high percentage of the enrollees in hard science and engineering at the graduate level.

All this holds immense potential promise, the realization of accomplishments humankind in past ages couldn’t have dreamt of, but also potential apocalyptic horrors. Nuclear fission has given us a new source of energy, but also the explosive force to annihilate all humankind. Even fertilizers can be utilized to produce weapons of mass destruction. In the long term, environmental damage caused by the spread of technology also poses formidable threats. The government of this country is at great pains to prevent nuclear proliferation. However, the primary peril is caused by those who possess nuclear weapons right now, the United States being number one in the order of magnitude. The argument that–because we are more responsible and exercise greater restraint–we alone are entitled to keep overwhelmingly the largest nuclear arsenal and that only the handful who already possess such weapons can be allowed to retain them doesn’t hold; it is not reasonable to expect the world community to accept this as a premise indefinitely.

Historically, the states having the most powerful armies have not necessarily ranked among the most ethical. Genghis Khan would have presumably subscribed to the thesis that he had God’s OK for conquering a large part of the earth, but the vanquished peoples would have demurred. Considering its power, the US exercised comparative restraint from the middle to the end of the 20th century. Toward the end of World War II there was a race for the atom bomb; the Germans would not have hesitated to use it. In the circumstances, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not completely unjustifiable, given the prospect of US casualties had the bombs not been dropped. But at this writing, the George W. Bush administration is showing disregard for a whole array of international agreements, bans, treaties, and organizations aimed at securing peace, sustainable environmental practices, and the elimination of the most destructive as well as inhumane weapons, and it is pursuing unilateral power policies using intimidation.

At its best, the American spirit has stood for freedom, optimism, generosity, progress, democracy, equity, and fairness. Yet it has also a streak of destructiveness, aggression, recklessness, frustration, impatience, wastefulness, and violence that has manifested itself from the start in the slaughter of the natives, the senseless despoiling of the environment, the overexploitation of natural resources, the gun culture, and the high crime rate. The threat that the fermenting, pent-up nihilistic forces will not rest until they bring about a world conflagration unmatched by any in the past is a real one.

The forte of the American educational system is the graduate school. Catering to mediocrity has prevented primary and secondary instruction from providing a solid background in English syntax, composition, vocabulary, and mechanics of expression, arithmetic, mathematics, science, social science, and foreign languages throughout the primary- and secondary-school grades. Standards have been lowered in college curricula as well, particularly in the public segment and within that at community colleges, from the laudable motive of making higher education accessible to everyone as well as from the not-so-laudable one of raising state and federal funding and tuition fees; as a result, it can no longer be taken for granted that a graduate can spell, write grammatically correct sentences, or has the vaguest idea of history or geography. By contrast, athletics are keenly competitive and are often the only aspect of school taken seriously by students, parents, and the general public alike. In this, a certain upside-down logic seems to prevail, as outstanding athletic achievement can hardly be expected to make this into a better world.

An inconsistency of the system is that, with all the talk about the supposed public concern for education, schools of education have low academic standards. I had been unaware of this until, between my bachelor’s and doctor’s, I went for a master’s degree in education. Showing up for class and satisfying minimal course requirements, with the addition of smiling warmly at the professor to demonstrate my cooperative disposition, just about sufficed. The low standards in turn affect the quality of instruction at the elementary-, middle-, and high-school levels. In educational jargon the master metaphor of the educational process is borrowed from manufacturing. The school building is referred to as the school plant. A Harvard graduate is called a “product” of Harvard. Another favorite analogy comes from commerce. I heard a college president, referring to the field of education, say, “I have been in this business for ten years now.” Administrators, by the way, prefer to describe themselves as managers: the way they look at it, this is upgrading their status; if education is a manufacturing process, they are factory managers. A considerable part of their task is a PR exercise to obtain money, in the form of donations, grants, bequests, etc. To enhance the reputation of a school, perhaps nothing works better than a great football team. Another PR gimmick is the awarding of honorary degrees to celebrities: actors, politicians, business leaders. Dolly Parton, a well-endowed lady to use the phrase in a sense customary in the US, was the recipient of this type of instant education. Business accounts for the largest number of bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded. As Coolidge accurately remarked, the business of America is business.

Traditionally children were to a considerable degree at the mercy of and often abused and exploited by their elders practically all over the world. Since authority was vested in the first instance in the parents, much of the abuse was likewise practiced by them. And as the traditional system was generally paternalistic, the father as the head of the household shared the brunt of the responsibility for it. The realization that harsh punishment, child labor, and subjection to the whim of the adults in charge of minors were wrong had gradually grown over time, leading to new educational theories. The roots of these in Europe reach at least as far back as the Renaissance. In the States the humane outlook was championed distinctively by the progressive education movement. That movement stood for a more understanding and tolerant view on a variety of issues. The recommendations of progressive education were never fully implemented in educational policy, but the permissiveness attributed to it was blamed by the emerging conservative backlash–probably not altogether without foundation–for the lowering of scholastic standards. Yet, as I have had occasion to point out, the cult of mediocrity is part of the American ethos, and it could be argued that in this respect Dewey’s philosophy served as an endorsement of that ethos against the elitist European-inspired educational system inherited from colonial times.

At any rate, there is a tension or contradiction in American life between, on the one hand, the espousal of mediocrity which mocks and even persecutes the nerd–who in fact may simply be an exceptionally gifted person–and, on the other hand, an equally strong pressure to excel in athletics, to become a leader, and in later life to be financially successful. The American ideal has been to resolve this contradiction by achieving a synthesis of the regular guy (who embraces the mass culture with its limitations on intellectual horizon, moral responsiveness, and artistic sensibility) and the leader, millionaire, or celebrity–shall we say, a CEO who has a private plane but goes to the ball games, uses expletives, watches wrestling on TV, is a member of fraternal organizations, and an avid hunter. He would only exceptionally be caught in business fraud, for such people know how to avoid scandals. But most who pursue this goal never achieve it, because by definition all cannot be leaders. That this ideal or idol therefore has clay feet is suggested by the US rates of crime and violence, which are very high for a country with a comparable per capita GNP. However, the crime rate is just an outward, superficial indicator and doesn’t show the hidden underground strains of US society, the abyss of nihilism yawning below.

Today in the US the home by and large does not pressure youngsters unduly to succeed in academics, and most schools do not place disproportionate demands on them. Abuse and harsh treatment of children continue to be an appalling problem in numerous parts of the world. Child labor has been greatly reduced in this country. Children are exploited and abused, but primarily not in the ways they were under traditional systems. In certain respects the wheel has turned, and today’s situation is the opposite of what obtained in former days. Children are deluged with toys and gadgets–among them both real and toy weapons of destruction and ATVs that are hazardous for them as well as harmful to the environment–and are frequently calling the shots in the family. They demand rather than ask. They mistreat the adult world probably as often as vice versa. After knocking themselves out caring for them and paying for their education, instead of getting thanks, the parents are in turn oftentimes falsely accused by their children of having abused them.

Children’s and adolescents’ lives do indeed come under sometimes unendurable pressures, but in this environment, which Riesman called outer-directed, it is exercised principally by their own peers. Actually, peer pressure has probably always been an underestimated factor in children’s lives. The extent of it may not have been realized in former days because even then children moved in their separate world as it were, lacking the rapport with their parents and teachers to confide in them, to complain for instance about the bullying they had to endure at the hands of schoolmates and playmates. With the decline or at least diminution of parental and other supervisory authority, peer pressure has certainly become a major force. Yet this is not taking place in a vacuum. Though less controlled than before, children are part of the wider social fabric and influenced by its values. In their newfound freedom they are probably actually closer to the adult world now. Whereas previously they had to obey the parental bidding whose rationale was “do as I say, don’t do as I do,” now they can do more as their elders do. As well, they have their TV shows, most of these being crude, wild, and violent; and tweens and teens can choose their own favorite music from among the ranks of hip-hop and rap artists. As a market, they are commercially targeted, often misled, and exploited. The role models set before them even by school instruction are not infrequently unsuitable. Heroes in TV series for the young typically pay lip service to honesty and fairness while they engage in perpetual violent combat. Rock idols tend to be brutal swellheads and/or sexually conniving frauds often utilizing a vocabulary and gestures that degrade humans.

Scores of potentially valuable and praiseworthy achievements, inventions, developments, innovations, initiatives, and institutions have come from the US. It has promoted the ideal of equality, although has not nearly lived up to it. It was one of the first countries to provide acceptable economic living conditions for a large percentage of its citizens, though many have been left out. After the Second World War, it behaved generously toward the defeated nations, instead of exercising a policy of revenge that had largely been the accepted practice in history until that time. In the years following World War II, it disbursed foreign aid federally, organizationally, and individually to an extent previously unprecedented. Some of the federal part paid for weapons though–the US has been the number one arms exporter for some time–that have not contributed to the welfare of the world. The UN itself was the outcome of an American initiative. It represented an improvement over the League of Nations. Yet it had some inherent flaws from the start: it reserved a preferential role for the victors, real and nominal, of World War II (permanent Security Council membership, official languages). The situation obtaining in 1945, at the conclusion of the Second World War, which from our present-day perspective is just an incident in history, should not form the basis of a permanent arrangement. Although the UN gave a voice to all participating governments, its founder and patron, the US, which was the real victor in any case, regarded it a bit as a toy–let’s play United Nations, kids, Uncle Sam will teach you how–it could take out of or put back into its pocket. When its resolutions do not back up US policy, this is seen as breaking the rules (“the UN not showing its relevance”). To point out just one glaring disparity, India and Luxemburg each have one vote, which weights the latter absurdly. Most pertinently, some governments do not at all stand for the will or interest of their citizens, and none at present does so perfectly. Even if individually they did stand for their interest, it might likely be at the detriment of other states. In case we take seriously the proposition that all men are equal, what would really be needed is not an assembly of governments directed by a handful who claim to represent their citizens but a nongovernmental organization elected by all the citizens of the world that cares for the people of the entire planet.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

Just Off the Boat

At Fordham College it was hard to adjust to the idea that, by virtue of being an immigrant “just off the boat,” I was the low man on the totem pole. In my native Hungary, where I had attended secondary school at what was considered one of the most prestigious such institutions in the country, I found it easy to make friends. At Fordham I became conscious of not hitting it off well with many of the students. Yet it came as a surprise when one day, leaving the classroom, I happened to glance at a copy of the student paper that was left lying on one of the benches. The paper was running a poll on the most popular, best dressed, handsomest, most likely to succeed, etc. in the class. I saw that whoever had sat there filled in my name for each category. It took me a few seconds to grasp that this was meant as a joke; it was a shock, and a realization that would grow on me. Nevertheless, in senior year I became editor of the college’s literary magazine, something of an accomplishment for one relatively new to the English language.

I had left Europe in 1950 with the idea that I was not going to uncritically capitulate to the American mentality but accept and try to emulate whatever I consider worthwhile in it while holding on to the moral precepts I had gradually evolved for myself as guidelines by that time. There was something pompous and self-important, perhaps even hypocritical, about this resolve, and time and again I would fall short of my own ideals, typically when they were tested by prosaic, humdrum everyday reality. Yet my moral convictions were not all sham; I would stand up for them to risk unpopularity and even retribution. Owing to my family’s political persuasion, to mention just one important sphere, I had not been in a comfortable middle-ground position in my native Hungary either. While sentiments were generally pro-German during the war at the school I was attending, at home we were rooting for the Allies, and as the government was steering progressively closer to the Reich, I opted for avoiding political discussions with my classmates. Another obstacle dividing me from the mainstream, which I had to keep private as the school in question was run by a Catholic order of monastics, was my doubts concerning religious dogma. But in 1948 a Soviet-backed regime was taking over in Hungary; by the fall of that year all schools were “nationalized” (i. e., secularized), which meant that no religious schools were allowed to operate, and Communist dogmatism proved so autocratic as to make Catholicism seem liberal in comparison. From that time on my conflicts were with educational policies and tactics inspired by the Communist Party.

I recall that when I came to the United States I was impressed by the fairly outspoken way students objected to rules they disapproved of. In Communist Hungary I had had a run-in with school authorities when I refused to sign a statement condemning the head of the Catholic hierarchy. That refusal was a nearly unprecedented act (I was in fact expelled for it), because in the context of Hungarian society submission to school regulations was generally taken for granted. Over here, on the other hand, I noted, students were conscious of their rights. This struck me straight away as a praiseworthy feature of life in the US.

But in numerous respects I disagreed with their ethical perspective. I deal with this at greater length in other sections; here I just wish to say a few words about what I realized early on was the personality type preferred by Americans. It happened to be at loggerheads with the one set before me as a model by parents, teachers, and the authors I cherished as well as the one I personally aspired to resemble.

In the dormitory suite I shared with seven classmates, one of us, Nick, was occasionally visited by a friend who seemed to me a rather nice and pleasant fellow. Once, after this person had just left, Nick asked me, “Did you see how timid he is? He is scared to knock on my door.” Nick said this as if he were revealing a moral defect or at any rate a compromising secret. Frankly, I had noticed only that Nick’s visitor was an affable person; and while I had run into this type of reaction to shyness before, I thought it objectionable.

Bill, a friend of mine who had an exceptionally keen mind, flunked out of college because, being an incorrigibly late riser, he was “overcut” in several of his courses. He was promptly drafted into the Army, and as he scored high on the intelligence test, sent to officers’ school. I kept in touch with him. He talked to me about a fellow trainee. “He completely lacks self-confidence,” Bill said maliciously, and proceeded to tell me that he apprized his superior about the man’s personality deficiency. “What did he say?” I asked. “He is going to watch the guy.” The oddest thing about this was that Bill should have known better because, although extraordinarily sharp, he himself was subject to severe feelings of inferiority.

During my years as a high-school teacher, Fred, a colleague who taught social studies, became my friend. He was physically handicapped, having to use crutches to get around, but he had an iron will, a great sense of humor, and was popular with the students. After an assembly where our principal had given an address, he came up to me. “Did you notice how nervous he was?” he asked me in an incriminatory tone you would use about someone caught in the act of stealing. He quickly caught on, however, when I made no comment, and he added, “Well, I suppose it’s human.” Fred, who had a certain discernment, made a concession to the different take I had on this matter, but he shared the basic US approach to an embarrassed or timid person, which is, instead of helping that person, seizing on the embarrassment as something you can legitimately build on and exploit.

At the same school, the teachers were on one occasion addressed by a speaker who was making the rounds on behalf of the New York State Department of Education with the objective, presumably, of raising teaching morale. In the course of his talk he cited the case of a science teacher he once knew who had a terrible personality. This guy in the speaker’s mind seemed to be a despicable wretch, a sort of human cockroach. As he went on describing him, it nevertheless also emerged that the man in question was a person dedicated to his subject, and though he had what I would have described a reserved demeanor, was actually an effective science teacher. Somehow the speaker conflated the concept of being contemptible, by which understand: shy–at least from the viewpoint of an irrepressible extrovert–and being genuinely committed to one’s calling. Of course he had been dispatched by the state education authorities with the purpose of inspiring us, but the personal cause of the speaker was to put us, the audience, on the defensive, to sort of challenge us whether we came up to his criterion of extroversion. Grotesquely, though, he appeared to be struggling with a mild but unmistakable case of the jitters throughout his presentation.

While I had already started studying for my Ph. D., I taught at a New York City preparatory school where most of the students came from wealthy homes and many were sons of celebrities, with a sprinkling of successful East Coast literati among them who had published best-selling plays and novels. The faculty had a largely undeserved reputation for being topnotch; some of them had a certain preppy gloss, but they were on the whole less knowledgeable than public-school teachers. To earn a teaching certificate at a New York public school, you needed, I believe, thirty credits or thereabouts of graduate work, whereas at a private school a bachelor’s degree, or possibly just the principal’s nod, sufficed. I personally was hired for being a Hungarian. Just as I was going in for the interview, I saw a myopic-looking middle-aged man leave, with defeat written all over his face, and I felt sorry for him–lacking as I do a taste for knocking out competitors. The principal seemed to regard as my crucial qualification for the job of Latin teacher that Hungary had a good football team. He mentioned that he had just seen another applicant, a Haitian. But whoever heard of Haitian football? I sure hadn’t.

A colleague at that school, the name of Sturgis, by the way a man the French call faux dur, that is, someone who acts and wants to look, although he isn’t, tough, referred in a conversation to a student or colleague as having a deplorably “apologetic attitude.” The phrase struck me right away as significant, and had me wondering whether that was the way Americans saw me. I hasten to add that apologetic has a connotation I consider legitimately negative, as applied to people who habitually and knowingly neglect their responsibilities and then fall back on some cheap, whining apology instead of actually mending their ways. But in a much broader sense the American reading of the European who forever apologizes and says “thank you” is grievously mistaken. Apart from cases when I have done something that is clearly wrong, I tend to apologize in order to give the other person her or his due as an equal whom I should not impose on or take for granted. As for the related habit of thanking: on my first trip to England I noted that the waitress says “thank you” when she actually renders you a service, e. g., places the plate in front of you. This would be completely wrong usage in the US, where the closest formula is “you are welcome,” but of course only in reply. And in Denmark the “tak, tak, tak” sometimes comes with the frequency of a rattle–all life seems to be a litany of thanking someone for something.

Both apologies and frequent thanks strike people over here as servile; indeed my manner was once called just that to my face, and sycophantic to boot, behind my back.

My mom’s favorite virtue was humility, but I never saw her being even remotely obsequious. The two are distinctly different in my book.

When, in my late twenties, I described myself in a letter to Paul Fabry with the phrase–which I had read somewhere and found humorous as well as somewhat apposite– “a young man with a great future behind him,” he wrote back disapprovingly, saying it was an approach that would not get me anywhere in this country. Fabry as a fellow Hungarian émigré simply gave me a well-meant piece of advice, which I perhaps should have taken to heart? At any rate, he went on to a distinguished career.

When I meet someone for the first time, my nearly automatic starting point is to build him or her up, saying something to show appreciation and respect, primarily I think out of ingrained habit. Thousands of disappointments, occasions when my initial good faith was only used to serve as a foothold for my interlocutors for abusing me, have not managed to break this habit, and I seem to be condemned to repeat it, although I now realize that it just does not work in certain environments.

Those who succeed best over here tend to be people who adapt and adjust to the methods of the natives, in which aggressiveness and deceptiveness play an important part. This is of course not to gainsay that in addition to those traits aggressive and deceptive persons can have varied admirable talents. Immigrants to these shores have indeed contributed much that has benefited not only the people of the US but humanity at large as well. To illustrate the quintessential example of someone embodying the character traits that make one a success in the US, particularly the West, while in my view he is not a particularly admirable human being, I would cite Arnold Schwarzenegger.

First Westerners I Met

In the next few paragraphs I will briefly describe, by way of my preliminary introduction to the American West, the people I had met who came from that part of the country prior to 1968, when I moved to Washington State.

The first American from the Far West I knew was a graduate student at Fordham who lived in the same dormitory as I. He put a sign on his door, reading, “John Doe [I don’t recall his name] from the wild and wooly West where men are men and women like it that way.” Slight and scrawny, he actually didn’t in the least look what Americans consider the he-man type. He would make as if he were trying to elude me when he saw me in the hall–even back then, this struck me as being possibly playacting; in retrospect, in the context of what I have since learned about the Western mentality, I recognize this as part of the standard Far-West repertory of slippery stunts.

However, there was another graduate student from the West, a Californian, whom I also got to know during my Freshman year. He gave me unsolicited and generous help. Of Hungarian descent, he came to pay me a visit, having heard that there was a Hungarian immigrant on campus. It turned out that he had seen me in the dining hall but, he said, it didn’t occur to him I could be an immigrant. “You look so American,” he added disapprovingly. To this day I don’t know what made me look American in his eyes, or why he considered this bad. He was into Republican politics, and some time later, when I mentioned that I was being drafted by the Army, he wrote to Senator Knowland, whom he knew personally, to intervene on my behalf. The senator in turn asked the draft board to defer me, saying that being a recent arrival to this country I should not be called up so soon but be given a chance to find my bearings. I may add that it had never even crossed my mind the student in question would or could help in that matter. Let this stand as a testimonial to the generosity of some Californians.

At the Newport, Long Island high school, where I taught French and Latin in the late fifties, Miss Breaux was foreign-language chair. She hailed from the Pacific Northwest, as she would explain with a lofty-breezy air intimating the exquisiteness of the region and the superiority of its inhabitants. Her French was rudimentary; she was of German extraction, the original spelling of her name being Breu. The rank of chairman, she confided in me, had been fiercely contested, and in the competition leading to the appointment her colleagues had acted “very mean.” At any rate, she had won. Her strongest qualification may have been that she was the principal’s friend. They were both unmarried women in their sixties. I had the impression that they hated each other and yet were somewhat in league owing to their similarity in age and marital status.

The principal, a Miss Kaufmann, had hired me over a number of other applicants–this was a sought-after district with a fairly high pay scale. On the first day of school Miss Kaufmann smiled as she pressed my hand warmly. It seemed that, regarding me as an eligible bachelor, she expected an intimate relationship, and was willing to overlook the age disparity. “I am old enough to be, well, almost your mother,” she mused during a conversation. Actually, she was sufficiently old enough to be my grandmother. When she judged that my response to her overtures was not as enthusiastic as it ought to have been, she accused me of having a cold personality which, in her view, apparently marred my performance as a teacher. She gave me a couple of more chances to test my personality, and when she found that the warmth of my smile upon seeing her still did not reach the desired temperature, she despaired of my teaching abilities and enlisted Miss Breaux as an ally against me.

At the time I was not fully cognizant of how supposedly professional evaluations could depend on personal relationships in this country, and I imagined–fatally in error–that as long as I did my job conscientiously they would not do anything. Although there were no complaints against me from either students or parents, I fulfilled my responsibilities impeccably, and in professional competence rated high above the average foreign-language teacher by any objective standard, my contract was not renewed. The two ladies realized that I was an easy victim to vent their frustrations and spleen on; that I would not stoop to their level to retaliate.

A teacher of English, whose name was Gerry Greenfield, was also from the Far West, perhaps Northwest; he was a nice affable guy basically, he was one of these Americans who actually do smile a lot; his was an unstrained, humble smile. As I recall he had just gone through his first experience of fatherhood, and was fascinated by his daughter’s intelligence. Greenfield had a tendency to agree with whatever I said, which I have since also found typical of some Far Westerners who won’t contradict you as long as they accept you as a friend, even if you tell the most palpable absurdities.

At the New York City private school I describe elsewhere, one of the students, Chris, was the son of a big-time celebrity, a Hollywood actress of world renown. He had grown up in the City of Angels, but at one point his parents parted company, and he moved East with his father, an advertising man, while a brother, who was Chris’s junior by a year, and whom the mother supposedly preferred to Chris, stayed with her. Chris possessed what I later identified as some of the Far Westerner’s most unsavory character traits. Had I considered him in that frame of reference then, I might even have thought twice before moving to the West, but I saw him rather as a Hollywood specimen instead of a foretoken of the kind of student I was to face out here.

According to their media-fabricated image, celebrities love their fans; I got my first whiff of the truth behind this claim when Chris described fans as a nuisance: “they slobber all over you,” he commented contemptuously. Although, at least by that time, his mother in her public appearances emanated an aura of propriety and religious piety, Chris’s metaphors that, in all probability, had their roots in the home environment, tended to have an obscene, demeaning, and guileful quality. His mind was obtuse, he had no interest in or talent for academic learning, and his personality reminded one of a reptile, yet he was conceited and condescending, apparently thinking of himself as “big” in the best American tradition of “big is good.” I remember that he called me “this little man” once, wishing to diminish my status in front of a third person. Perhaps most foretelling of what I was eventually to endure from denizens of the Woolly West, he made a show of being reluctant to appear in class in a snooty and slithery manner. But he was at his most characteristic Western self at telling me “I pity you” when in fact he was boiling over with vindictive spite.

Peggy, a colleague at NYU, went to teach in California and came back a year later, saying that she couldn’t take it: the students didn’t show up for class, didn’t care, and the people were phony. Here in New York at least I know everyone hates me, she said.

The Far West–By Reputation and at First Hand

Peggy’s report was the one concrete personal info about Far Western academic life that could have served as a warning. All my other experiences with people from that part of the country were too fragmentary to add up to a unified picture. Aside from these, I could rely only on what I read or heard about it in books and the media.

There was, first of all, the reputation for freedom, especially regarding Californians. Campaigning, I believe, in San Francisco, Stevenson, cheered ecstatically by the crowds, remarked to a journalist who interviewed him after his speech, “Well, these are said to be the freest people on earth.” His remark sounded a tiny bit like a concession, for that city was associated in the public’s mind with loose morals, which Stevenson likely wanted to distance himself from. The reputation was, further, for openness and friendliness; one saw the hail-fellow-well-met smile of the Westerner in the movies and on TV– the self-generated standard image. This picture had as its historical backdrop in the media the pioneering ranch family, pure in heart, with staunch morals.

Yet in the typical Western you also had the outlaw aspect, gun-toting, violence, vigilante justice, the gold rush, rowdiness, saloons, prostitutes, cowboys engaging in continual fistfights. This had its sequel for instance in TV crime series such as Dragnet, playing in the contemporary Western metropolis.

On the other hand, I had before me the picture of Hollywood, not as created by Hollywood but, contrariwise, as seen by Europeans who found it bogus and mercenary with, for instance, its strange funeral customs which try to deny death; all the effort to hide life’s dark side; and the gaudy, flashy, tinselly atmosphere of the dream factory. Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” made quite an impression on me; today, well over half a century later, I remember some parts of it vividly, almost verbatim. From Waugh’s macabre story Californians emerged, I would say, as no more than remotely human, and not so much evil as rather utterly incomprehensible from the point of view of the educated Briton: robots with hands and feet like the rest of us but lacking human feelings or ideas. Father Culhane, one of the Jesuits who originally welcomed me at Fordham, said that “New York is not America,” yet this vague sense I had that something was missing from Americans to make them like ordinary mortals as I explain in the section What Character? was based in large part on my impression of New Yorkers, they being the first Americans with whom I came into contact. I learned about another work on the same theme, Jessica Mitford’s “The American Way of Death” from a critique in the Times Literary Supplement or perhaps the New York Times Book Review, and I read Huxley’s “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” in the fifties or early sixties.

I do not wish to examine the merits of these works here, as I am referring to them merely by way of sketching my concept of the American West before settling in that part of the world. I will just say that while all three authors had somewhat dubious credentials for attacking the culture of California, their comments were on the whole well taken. In addition, when I was reading “Brave New World” as well as “Stern der Ungeborenen” (“The Star of the Unborn”), it seemed to me that both Huxley and Werfel had to some extent the American experiment in mind (it has in fact been suggested that Werfel’s book owed much to his unhappy experiences in California). There were some common themes in most of these works: shallowness, robotization, unwillingness to face death, denial of pain, and an unrealistic accent on the positive, mercenariness, lack of individuality and character, a spirit of make-believe. The search for the good life akin to the Greek definition of the term, built on a hedonistic pleasure ethic.

It is curious to note that neither the image of the 19th-century lawless Wild West and its contemporary sequel as the crime-ridden modern metropolis nor the pleasure-seeking, superficial Western culture as pictured in the satires and dystopias written by Europeans would seem to have anything to do with the puritanical Protestant ethic that is often identified as having been the dominant factor in the life of colonial New England and the early days of the republic. All three would appear–at least on the surface—mutually exclusive. Just as the cult of mediocrity and fierce competition coexist; just as the obscenities and vulgarities of colloquial speech subsist side by side with the Latinized pomposities of so-called standard American, this triplicity of violence, deception, and puritanical order characterizes US society. The contradiction is probably more apparent than real. Consider the case of Joseph Smith, his Puritanical background; hard work, frugality, and business acumen being as much a part of his character as treasure hunting, picturing himself as the finder of golden tablets inscribed with sacred writings, and preaching polygamy; the journey of the Mormons to the West. The denial of sex, which is often associated with Puritanism, is itself a falsehood, and people who subscribe to it will tend to seek some release in substances such as alcohol and drugs, or the pressure will build up and eventually lead to an explosion at the individual level and perhaps to a cataclysm at the national and global levels. It is all a dangerous and potentially lethal mix, which has already led to both constructive and destructive feats never before seen in history.

I set out on my journey to the West with great anticipation. Of course it was yet another plunge into the unknown and so worrisome. I mentioned to one of the NYU secretaries that I was leaving to take up a position at WSU. I added, “I don’t know if it’s going to work out.” She replied, “I have a hunch that it will,” and her words, though objectively amounting to no more than a polite remark of encouragement, somehow took on a disproportionate significance in my mind, as if they were a good omen and bound to prove true. I would be reminded of it time and again when things in fact didn’t look as if they were going to work out at WSU, and I would draw reassurance from it.

It is one of my character traits that I welcome the challenge of a completely new, for me unprecedented situation. I flew in to Spokane, which looked clean, prosperous, and well ordered and checked in at the Davenport—a rather upscale hotel—probably at the suggestion of the cab driver. Next morning, the waiter who brought breakfast took a suspicious look at me and left in haste. He acted unmistakably as if he feared sexual advances from me. This was the first time in my life that this sort of game was played on me. It proved only a foretaste of things to come; in fact only a short time after, at another hotel, when I ordered some beverage from room service, two came to deliver it, a woman carrying the glass and a man who suggested very artfully, with a suspicious and accusing expression worthy of an accomplished player, that he had to come along to protect her from me.

Echoing Miss Breaux’s sentiment, Professor Avery, who had hired me, had said that “the Northwest is a delightful area.” This was indeed quite true speaking of the region as a whole, but not specifically of the countryside south of Spokane. From the Greyhound bus I took, the Palouse Empire, as it is called, looked parched and barren, almost desert-like, in August. The town of Pullman itself, with its well-watered though tiny lawns, resembled an oasis in the desert, its buildings huddled together because every square inch of irrigable space is at a premium.

As my Ph. D. is in comparative literature, it had been agreed that my appointment would be split between the English and Foreign Language Departments. Frankly, I had originally hoped to teach graduate courses in my area of specialization, 20th-century European fiction. Instead, I was assigned to teach mainly French courses for the Foreign Language Department and Humanities courses for the English Department. The Humanities coordinator, Davis McElroy, was still away on vacation. I learned that he had written a book entitled “Existentialism and Modern Literature,” published by the Philosophical Library, and I mentioned to a senior member of the faculty that, being interested in the subject, I was looking forward to meeting him. “Well,” he replied, in a tone that implied he was sorry to disappoint me, “he is a little sandy-haired chap.” It was an altogether unexpected answer, I must say. What had the man’s hair color to do with his erudition? The remark which, accompanied by the appropriate facial expression, insinuated that my interest in that person had to do with his physical attributes, was all the more absurd as it came from an academic, whom one would have thought capable of having some appreciation of scholarship.

In another, more discomfiting experience, occurring also at the introductory stages of my Far West saga, a man of about thirty, whose status at WSU I no longer recall, abruptly snatched some object he needed (or possibly pretended to need) from the desk at which I was seated. He did this with such exaggerated haste and alarm that I realized it was a gross insinuation. He was playing that if he got too close to me I would try to make a pass at him, I guess? As he was sexually so irresistibly attractive? At that point in time this type of behavior was still altogether unexpected and startling for me. I didn’t know how to react to it–actually to this day I have not found a way to shield myself from it. When, for example, in an incident that took place some time later, a man (a complete stranger to me, by the way) who was to give me a ride in his truck in connection with some business I had to transact with him, appeared reluctant to let me sit next to her daughter, I still couldn’t immediately grasp the reason for his unwillingness. But at least by that time the abyss of make-believe, suspiciousness, innuendo, xenophobia, and trickiness constituting Far West life had started to open up before me.

I wound up teaching mostly one-hundred-level Humanities and two-hundred-level French courses, with just one, 20th-century French literature, offered however only every other semester, coming close to my actual area of specialization, and soon I was beginning to realize why Peggy had fled the Far West to come back to NYU.

My Humanities 101 section started to shrink. Before class, a student would be standing at the door of the classroom waiting for me, to say with inimitable grace, as you would imagine a friendly executioner speak, “I want your signature.” Did they regard me as a celebrity? Not quite; they needed my autograph to drop the course. This outwardly courteous manner is one way–though certainly not the only one–the Westerner has of killing you. This time they were smiling, knowing they were hurting me. After a while, I would approach the classroom in the morning with a sinking heart, dreading there would be again someone waiting for me by the door. Just the right start to make you feel confident about your lecture! And what if all drop and the class whittles down to zero? I visualized a note in my mailbox from the department chairman that he wants to have a talk with me. I had had the experience of being fired twice before. This sort of thing takes its toll on your self-assurance: failure becomes a routine, a pattern for events to be shaped that is inevitable; you expect it, and in effect you make it happen if nothing else by fearing it, broadcasting the idea as it were that you are a loser, in this environment, where all is riveted and staked on success.

Despite all the high-flown rhetoric about individualism in the United States as propounded by homegrown academics in ponderous works of philosophy and political science, the Americans I have known were preponderantly governed by a herd psychology. In my Humanities section dropping became the vogue; in my two French sections there were no or very few dropouts that semester, but they had a cornucopia of other tricks to make up for it. The French coordinator, Arthur Stabler, let me know that two students in one of these sections came to complain to him. They said that I didn’t look at them while talking to them.

What they said was actually true. It does happen to me that I avoid looking at people while talking to them. If I want to be exact about it, there are two reasons for this habit: I do it out of shyness as well as because people often do not like to establish eye contact with me. The eye-contact business is one of those thorny points about which Americans are ambiguous. On the one hand, there is the popular-psychology urging to do it; on the other hand, I find that, in the real world, at least in the real America, when my glance even accidentally meets someone’s eyes, on at least ninety-nine out of each hundred occasions I get a rebuff of one sort or another. But I believe that even today nowhere outside the United States could such an issue be brought up as a cause for complaint by students against a professor. Whatever the global consensus on this, I would—metaphorically speaking–sink into the ground for shame before making it. And in fact rather than trying to harm a person by complaining to a superior behind his back, I would instinctively go out of my way trying to make him or her feel more self-confident.

What actually motivated those students is a complex matter all of whose ramifications I cannot deal with here. At one important level it was part of the American ladies’ campaign to punish the male gender en masse. A few years before, my brother faced an even fiercer attack at Columbia University from his women students who claimed that his manner with them was “patronizing.” Translating it into the un-American jargon of objective fact, this meant that he failed to show the deference, often abject submissiveness, US ladies ask, and in many cases demand from men as their prerogative. A father of seven, he had many obligations, and dreaded losing his job. He went through a period of agony hanging on desperately to it and, on the surface, seemingly won the battle: he was not fired. But in the process he worried to excess, completely lost his sleep, his health was undermined, and he died at the age of fifty-two.

In my case, as in my brother’s, the sine-qua-non reason for complaining was that these young women realized we were vulnerable, and they thought they should exploit this. It then, further, fitted into their anti-male agenda. If shyness is seen as a shortcoming, it is a disability (so long, that is, as we consider shyness, together with such qualities as humility, meekness, or modesty, a disability instead of a virtue, which it happens to be in other moral systems), comparable to lameness or arthritis. Yet surely it would have never occurred to them to bring up those conditions as a charge against someone.

Stabler prefaced his account of the gripe in question by saying that it was an unusual one (probably he hoped that this would humiliate me more); however, in my experience in this country students’ complaints are nearly always of a personal nature and practically never have to do with an instructor’s competence in her or his subject. I remember the instructor saying, way back in a teaching methods course I took at NYU studying for my master’s in education, that in teacher evaluations by students the teacher’s professional competence rarely plays a part. The instructor added that presumably teacher competence was something that the students “took for granted.” However, I found that an unsatisfactory explanation offered as an excuse for the fact that ad hominem appeals in truth outweigh considerations of professional competence.

In my other French 201 section, the girls (in lower-division French courses most students were female, as there is some sort of popular belief in this country that the study of French is particularly appropriate for women) hit on a different tactic. They played that they had to sit arm in arm to reassure each other or protect themselves, they were so scared of me. Now, I don’t know if it’s worth pointing out that I am a mild-mannered, scholarly type, for all intents and purposes incapable of violence, and that in fact nowhere on earth except in the Wild West has anyone ever claimed that I inspired fear in her or him. Most Wild West games are so transparently false as to make you wonder whether they are played to make the victim or anyone else believe that they are meant seriously. I would say that as a rule that is not even the intention. The purpose seems to be rather to hurt, annoy, and/or provoke. Another question is how any adult can reconcile this kind of behavior with his or her self-image as a decent human being. It has been my experience that they indignantly refuse the suggestion of being sneaky, let alone deceptive and insidious, which adds to the enigma.

However that may be, the imputation that I am violent has been made by Far Westerners literally more times than I could possibly remember implicitly by innuendo and insinuation and numerous times even explicitly. In the case I described above, one group complained that I was a weakling (and therefore, presumably, to use their terminology, queer), while the other adumbrated that I was a ruffian, violent, and dangerous. In this country these are actually the categories men get classed into by the feminine agenda. In either case, they are pronounced guilty. Men realize that their status is highly shaky, tend to be terrified by women, and are obsequious. People in a subservient position often try to get into their masters’ good graces by snitching on each other. American males snitch on each other to get into the ladies’ good graces. I am of course generalizing, but I maintain that this is substantially the state of affairs.

In Humanities 101, the students rarely objected openly to anything, almost never argued, in fact they were typically just interested in personal traits, their approval or disapproval having little to do with course content. A sort of passive dislike as a general attitude, subdued resentment and resistance. Sitting back silently, making innuendos, trying to exploit what they perceived as diffidence or embarrassment.

Students at WSU didn’t expect to be graded in an unbiased manner. This was for me a change from my experience with educational institutions both in Europe and the Eastern US, where grading practices based on personal preference were nonexistent, exceptional, or marginal depending on the given area. When I explained to my Humanities students that I didn’t look at the name until after grading a paper, they–especially the girls–didn’t like this at all. How can I describe their reaction? They seemed to take it as a sign of unfriendliness. They wanted their looks and perhaps their personalities to be included in the percentage. In a French 201 class the first test I gave showed that one of the students had next to no idea of the language. I asked to see her in my office, thinking that I might redirect her to a lower-level course instead of having to fail her. I asked what her high-school French grade had been. “Oh, I had an A,” she replied dismissively, but her manner intimated that this had less to do with her proficiency in the subject than her relationship with the instructor. She seemed to be taking for granted as well that I called her to my office to establish a relationship because of her beauty–I may add that she was exceptionally pretty–and convinced that the entire grading process was largely a function of personal appearance. Now, something in her past experience may well have caused that belief: she was in fact not coquettish; rather she was, I think, truly suspicious of my intentions.

The majority, particularly in the Humanities 101 classes, lacked essential communications skills: they couldn’t spell, write grammatically correct sentences, or organize material in a logical manner. I learned that the fraternities had term papers on file for humanities courses members could hand in as their own. Today, to be sure, term papers may be purchased on the net by anyone. The men considered sports more important than academics. A good part of the women were sent to college by their parents primarily in a quest for suitable husbands; getting an education was just a frill or an excuse.

I eventually noticed that in my lectures the students expected me to more or less make things up as I went along, because the background from which they came favored fiction, myth, and amazing tall stories over authenticated and attested fact. Once, just as an example of amusing pseudoscientific nonsense, I showed to a class some motion picture advancing a cockamamie geological hypothesis about the Flood. Its author emphasized in his introduction that he was a native of Washington State and included a photo that pictured him surrounded by his nice family. The class not only failed to manifest any amusement, but the midterm examination proved that it almost unanimously accepted the man’s creationist concept. Knowing that he came from the Northwest conferred in the students’ eyes more credibility on him than any scholarly achievement or qualification.

GAMES OF THE FAR WEST

Some Factors Contributing to the Prevalence of Make-Believe in the American West

Many threads must have contributed to the prominent role of make-believe in Far West culture; here I will discuss four important ones by way of introducing the subject: the peculiar sense in which democracy is understood; the Hollywood/commercial mentality; the idea that truth is perception; and the view that freedom of worship as enshrined in the constitution guarantees the validity of any, even the most fanciful, religious notions.

Political democracy has a salutary balancing influence that tends to reduce excesses and inequities, but its legitimate scope can be inflated or its essence adulterated to mean that truth equates majority opinion, and that the customs, manners, and preferences of the majority are the right ones. Democracy thereby runs the danger of promoting mediocrity and reducing standards to the lowest common denominator. In US society this has led to a certain anti-intellectual bias that is often deplored by Europeans. Particularly in the American West, I have often encountered the distrust and incredulity with which “regular guys,” that is, members of the majority, who at this point are still the uneducated–one must include a good many college graduates in their ranks–confront science and scholarship. When, for instance, I wanted to solve a practical problem of length by applying to it the Pythagorean theorem, which is indeed very elementary geometry, this was met by my Idahoan landlord with a frown of doubt and suspicion combined with what I may describe for lack of a better term as ethical disapproval–regular guys don’t do such things. The same fate befell my timid attempts to refer to the orbits of the planets. And these were not stupid people. Their expertise of car repair or building construction required intelligence far superior to grasping the elementary notions I was trying to put across regarding geometry and astronomy. At the same time, they prized college education: for its social and monetary value. My neighbor in a small rural community of North Idaho had a college degree, although his proficiency in English did not equal that of average European third graders in their respective native languages. He told me that he stored his college textbooks in the building where his hired hand lived. This was an expression of his assessment of academic learning–worthless.

Artistic, literary merit, humanistic erudition are of course suspect; any occupation that might suggest refinement is dismissed as sissified when pursued by a man. Music commonly has to compete with a power drill in volume of sound, and more often than not singing has to be inarticulate bawling to pass their muster.

On the other hand, folklore, superstition, and tall tales have a solid status in what they regard as credible. In the phrase of a Washingtonian I knew, “professors don’t know beans.” While anthropologists on the whole are, shall we say, somewhat hesitant to acknowledge the existence of the Sasquatch as fact (the late eminent WSU scientist Grover Krantz constituting one of the notable exceptions), the people of the Pacific Northwest place considerable reliance on it. I am not sure when I first heard about Bigfoot. At any rate, I recall an article in the local paper reporting that footprints of the creature had again been discovered. It included a comment by a resident who said that they looked genuine, “not something one could make with a board.” That is how I began to surmise the probable origin of those giant footprints: i. e., from a denial (of what was most likely the truth). Over the years I learned that one possible way you could infer the truth from what a Wild West person says is that he denies it. But the rub is that this is not a surefire method either; you have to know the circumstances, etc. People do not exhibit traits across the moral spectrum. Someone can be scrupulously honest in giving back your change, for example, and a rogue when he charges you for services. You are liable to be the victim of a lot of bum steers before you get some sort of clue on the type of lies people of an alien culture habitually engage in.

When I was a teacher at New Paltz High School, I attended a teachers’ conference where we listened to an address by an invited guest speaker, an IBM executive. He told us about IBM’s illustrious founder, Thomas Watson, who was famous for hanging signs all over company offices and plants with the motto “THINK.” Presumably this injunction prompted the speaker to withdraw into the inner fastness of his mind to reflect on the question, “What is the greatest thing a man can be?” And he came to the conclusion that the highest thing in the world was to be a salesman. Christ was the greatest salesman, he added. I imagine this was based on Christianity being the faith with the largest number of adherents: more people are sold on it than on any other religion. From there I think you could assert without making too great a leap that truth is what sells. Or, it is the image that counts. TV land is more real than reality.

Sometimes you can see on TV the daughter of a politician hugging her father with deep affection. When she thinks she is no longer on, she drops her smile instantly and puts on a sulking, disdainfully indifferent expression. Perhaps the doing of a mischievous cameraman. Such sacrilegious moments of reality breaking into neverland are rare. Americans have an unfailing sense for show business. The show must go on. With few exceptions, different categories of television are but different genres of fiction. Those that claim to be nonfictional are often the most deceptive because cooked up of an inextricable jumble of truth and falsehood. “Reality” television of course has little to do with reality, if not in an ironic way. “Clean” shows tend to be more perniciously pornographic than overt porn.

In or coming from the dream factory’s home state we have now had a string of actors-turned-politicians, the latest addition to this galaxy at this writing being actually a superannuated body builder-turned-actor-turned-politician. We are not far from a state of affairs where politics can be classified as a fictional genre.

As for the epistemological component of this theme, I wish to make the following comments. It would be out of place here to trace in the lineage of either skepticism or idealism from Pyrrho and Plato to Deconstruction. To take the latter, idealism, suffice it to say that in modern philosophy Descartes’s famous cogito foreshadowed what Bishop Berkeley nearly a hundred years later expressed as the view that reality is perception. 19th-century German idealism took this up, and it has been given new twists in directions as far apart as semiotics, Postmodernism, and interest in the occult. I note this merely to indicate that “reality is perception” is far from a state-of-the-art notion. And as for skepticism, according to the New Testament, already Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “what is truth?’

The direct influence of philosophy on US society is slight, but philosophical theories affect a variety of academic disciplines, and the impact of higher education cannot be discounted. Subjectivistic and relativistic conceptions trickle down into business schools, courses on leadership, and perhaps even “ethical fitness®” seminars. In the first two sections and in other passages throughout I show how the American version of democracy, as well as US commercialism and media employ make-believe. What could be termed the idealistic fallacy, which in its treatment sounds like and may have been meant as a witticism by the good bishop of Cloyne, is grist to the PR man’s mill. In this country the sense of the term democracy is extended to mean that if enough people agree on a lie it becomes true, and home-grown psychology backs this up.

Their interpretation of “freedom of religion” is a blank endorsement of wishful thinking: the truth is what I imagine, my daydream, best expressed by German Wunschtraum. You can make up any absurdity about the afterlife, God, or ghosts that suits your fancy which then in some way becomes true by virtue of your belief in it; your lie is as it were guaranteed to be true by the constitution. The realization of this struck me when I heard my Worley, Idaho landlord, Ray, talk about the life hereafter. Ray was a typical Idahoan: philanderer, fibber, jack-of-all-trades, a bit of a rogue. Raised on a farm too small to support a family in the age of agribusiness, he somehow, rather fortuitously, got into the line of buying, reconditioning, and selling old pianos. By the time I knew him, however, pianos had gone out of fashion, and he in effect traveled around, more for fun than profit, in an ancient van calling at people’s homes to tune pianos that he had sold them. His trade had been based on buttering up ladies, generally farmers’ wives, and in his fifties he no longer beguiled them: the classic “Death of a Salesman” syndrome. The time dedicated to religion was Sunday, and on Sunday mornings Ray would be in a lightheartedly festive mood. It was on such an occasion that, dropping in on me and spontaneously breaking out in a line or two of a hymn, he explained how things were going to be in the kingdom of heaven.

The picture he drew had recognizably Hollywoodish features, as religion in America is connected with the dream factory and commercialism both, or you might say is a branch of the, or just another, dream industry. God business is good business. One of the prominent televangelists, when he had a convention center built, insisted on luxurious, expensive accommodations, saying, “God is not cheap.” This is a country where Father Divine ran ads in the papers. Many think they have a direct line to God Almighty: the contemporary surge of Pentecostal or charismatic denominations draws on this penchant. Another Idahoan, Bob, asked me in the challenging tone of someone with the inside information, “Well, what do you think God looks like? Does He have a penis?” Bob gathered from my blank expression that I didn’t know, so he gave me the lowdown, assuring me that indeed He has one.

As it happens, Ray ascribed kindly powers to God, and when he was in a religious mood he saw the world through rose-colored glasses, but the same cannot be said about many fundamentalist cults whose adherents actually believe they have a mission from heaven to rid the world of evil people. The rose-colored view, God’s infinite love, His mercy, the divine plan according to which all is ordered benevolently and what seems evil is just a privation (lack of perfection) has been an aspect of Christianity and some other religions. But just as Hollywood has its Frankenstein’s monsters, Draculas, werewolves, and extraterrestrial visitors, being a nightmare factory as well, so religion has its demons, devils, malevolent spirits, and wrathful divinities.

The separation of church and state can be seen as a great advance over theocracies where the clergy rule as well as over systems with state religions that hinder all other types of worship, not to speak of regimes that are responsible for actual religious persecution. And so the freedom of religion is a manifestation of the genius of liberty that animated the founding fathers. It was of course understood by them that religious conviction cannot be used as an excuse or pretext for criminal actions. Yet the line between God’s purported will as followed by adherents of a faith and criminality is sometimes difficult to draw, and even seemingly harmless beliefs are dangerous when there is absolutely no objective evidence that they are based on truth. If a religion asserts that it has a monopoly on interpreting God’s will and that the sole chance of salvation resides in belonging to the religion in question, this claim, although on the face of it related to the life hereafter, has a great deal of impact on temporal earthly power. This is a problem of vast implications that will have to be faced eventually by mankind. “Freedom of religion” sounds fine, but how much can you get away with by claiming that what you are talking about belongs to the spiritual realm even though it has a direct obvious impact on matters in this world?

In any case, a logical leap is made when people assume, as many appear to do, that the guarantee of the free exercise of religion is equivalent to saying that the articles of faith of a given religion are true.

Open or Covert Society?

Karl Popper’s influential work, “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” sets the yardstick of a good social order by the amount of nonviolent freedom of expression it can allow and by the transparency of its political system. But the political sphere provides only a framework, and unless openness characterizes a community’s life as a whole its potential benefits are greatly reduced and may even become meaningless. If it is true on the one hand that Soviet-style regimes of the past presented a travesty of true democracy, on the other hand even a comparatively sound political basis won’t help much in a local environment where the inhabitants in effect trample on the premises of democracy in their private lives. The society of the Pacific Northwest–and as far as I can tell of the Far West in general–is in this sense more closed than any I have ever known.

I recall a program on WSU radio in which foreign students were asked their opinion of their American counterparts on campus. “They hide,” was the reply. That short remark merely scratched the surface of a vast complex of phenomena: the student was attempting to account for the whole strange atmosphere of covertness she had found there.

Now I shall describe an experience I had in Spokane some time after moving into this area. I am about to enter a large store. Suddenly the entrance door in front of me opens, and two ladies appear: they are in conspicuous precipitate hurry to get out. One of them heaves a deep sigh of relief, and says to her companion, “We made it!” I didn’t understand the meaning of the remark, because nothing like it had ever happened to me before. Then, after my memory replayed this puzzling incident a couple of times, I told myself, “Well, no, they couldn’t have been talking about me. If they had, they wouldn’t have said it so I could hear it.” But by the time similar tricks had been played on me perhaps the hundredth time, I came to realize that its very purpose was to make me hear it. My mistake was to start from a completely opposite set of values: taking it for granted that you don’t hurt people, at the very least not those who haven’t hurt you and about whom you know nothing.

On my walks usually something would happen that was disturbing but hard to define, furtive and oblique, expressed in a sign language I couldn’t for long decipher. Doors would slam, lights would go on, people would get into their cars and stay there, running the engine. But when occasionally they yelled “Get out of here!” and “Watch out!” I got the message, even though it came from behind my back. As I did when the girl at the checkout counter asked me if I had taken anything from the store. These good folks were apparently insinuating that I was, at best, a thief. And once they see they have succeeded in getting me rattled they start a gleeful caper: in a store, for instance, I will no longer be just getting the leery grin suggesting that I am there to steal something, but shop clerks will sprint past me, and a merry concert of whistling, sneering, and throat-clearing will be raised. They will run after you to demonstrate that they have to run away from you. An authoritarian regime relying on the secret police is very bad indeed, but a community composed of malicious clowns posing as detectives hasn’t much to recommend it either.

What I find most deeply troubling about this is not only the vigilante spirit, but the muffled, insidious texture of it all, and the assumption that an act of make-believe can be substituted for the truth if a large enough number join in; the fact that these people do not even want to be fair.

The paragraphs above are substantially taken from a radio commentary that was, to be sure, objected to and never aired. They express rather well my initial perplexity and continued bewilderment. Sneakiness is hardly compatible with the self-referential image of Westerners, but I have found it one of the most distinguishing and essential marks of their character. It will probably surprise you as a newcomer, but if you come to think of it there is no physical impossibility to, on the one hand, putting on an open, frank, innocent expression, even to the extent of parading, vaunting, and making a show of this and, on the other hand, engaging in underhanded activity. All you need is a fundamentally dishonest mental attitude. Of course acting ability helps. Western Americans are expert at making a pretense of performing a praiseworthy action while in fact engaging in some sort of shady hanky-panky.

I have learned from experience that wherever I happen to be in this part of the world something is likely to take place that is difficult to define, stems presumably from curiosity, hostility, suspicion, fear, or more likely just sheer malice aimed at exploiting some perceived vulnerability, and finds expression in furtive, shifty, and often insidious behavior. Sneakiness is a kind of background texture of the human environment in the Far West. While I have occasionally or sporadically met with comparable conduct elsewhere, I have indeed found it endemic and abundant over here.

There are many modalities of what, using the colloquial term, might be called creeping. I may start by saying that they can literally creep. Even adults will do it, in apparent open conflict with the Western self-image. Let me provide a few random illustrations of this puzzling phenomenon.

I arrive at some local branch of my bank in the morning a while before business hours. This in plain view of the employees inside. So they wait a couple of minutes past the official opening time, and when the clerk at last unlocks the door, instead of facing me or saying “hello” she bends down almost to the floor, a mischievous grin playing on her lips.

After shopping at a supermarket, while I am putting the shopping bags into the trunk of my car, an employee shows up and, pretending to do I know not just what, actually prostrates herself near the car, this little act (demonstration?) giving her such a charge that she breaks out in a chuckle.

Inside another store, while I am looking for an item on the shelves, a clerk takes up a similar recumbent position next to me on the floor.

On other, more numerous occasions, they just bend, stoop, crouch, or squat down when they see me (or to put it more accurately, when they can tell that I see them).

I described these incidents as puzzling because after all this time I still am not entirely sure of their meaning, though I have a general idea that they are supposed to indicate resentment/rejection/scorn.

People of the US West as I have come to know them have a real passion for peeking and snooping, which starts at an early age. Children crawl on the ground to conceal themselves, hug the wall, stopping at corners to peek, and even build barricades from behind which they can watch people in secret. The amazing part is that with many of them this continues into adulthood.

A relatively harmless variety of snooping is what I shall refer to as reconnaissance. For example, in the small North Idaho community where I bought a retirement home, one day I notice one neighbor sort of circling my property shortly after I have moved in, making loud comments whose significance I don’t catch, except that judging by her tone they could hardly be complimentary. In the same village, another person from the neighborhood comes around pretending to pick up junk on the empty lot just across the street from my house whenever I am in evidence, though actually the whole area is full of scraps that neither he nor anyone else ever bothers to remove.

Intending to buy a new automobile, I was at a car dealership in Coeur d’Alene. I was seated alone at a table. As part of the car-buying ritual, my salesman had just left, ostensibly to ask his boss whether the price could be reduced to match my offer. While I was waiting, other salesmen started to emerge from their lounge, filing by me one by one in short intervals to size me up, I imagine. Noticing that this procession discomfited me, they started to sneer, grimace, etc. By the time my salesman returned I felt thoroughly ill at ease and an object of ridicule. My salesman remained courteous: after all, he was making a handsome profit, while the others apparently viewed themselves as his competitors.

I arrive before a store opens and have to wait in the parking area in front. Soon I notice a stir in a nearby store that is already open. Again, as in the example above, people start to emerge from that store one by one, they pass in front of my car as if they were on an exploratory mission, their faces showing antipathy and suspicion.

Snoopiness in and of itself may even strike you as amusing if it is not done for some ulterior motive. But with these people it very often is. It can just be a first step, sniffing you out to find a point where they can attack you. If they see that they can embarrass you just by staring at you, it is apparently seen by them as already a good opening gambit. From there on they will destroy you gradually, bit by bit, depending on what they can get away with.

In contrast with this atmosphere of covertness and stealth concerning the private sphere in which at least the Western United States stands without parallel as far as my experience goes, in some respects the public, governmental, institutional, and political sectors show praiseworthy, indeed admirable openness. Of course the reality lags far behind the ideals of liberal individualism and leaves a great deal to be desired even in these sectors. For example, politics has been proverbially influenced by back-room deals, government by secret corruption, and institutional integrity by unacknowledged commercial considerations.

Privacy constitutes an interesting aspect of the problem, since in one of its senses it means secrecy. It could be argued that in a perfect society this type of privacy, i. e., keeping secrets, would be unnecessary. The reason why in societies such as they exist today it is morally justifiable to keep secrets is that (1) (a) owing to prejudice, some facts/deeds, though objectively not blamable from a moral point of view, are nevertheless condemned by some persons and (b) crooks can use certain information to defraud people; and that (2) many states do not serve the true interests of their citizens. In an ideal situation people would be free of prejudice and malice and the state would only have the true welfare of each citizen at heart. But those conditions do not obtain even in the best societies today. We need to keep secrets from other individuals just because, for instance, identity thieves can make purchases on our credit card if they learn our card number. And, typically in authoritarian regimes, people need (and fail to get) privacy from the state which aims at controlling them in favor of a privileged clique or false ideology.

Thus secrecy is indeed needed, but this need exists in direct proportion to the shortcomings of each society and state on this planet as well as of the relations between the latter. In the case of the United States, the contention that since around the mid-twentieth century governmental secretiveness and spying had to be stepped up as a countermeasure was not without a certain validity if one considers the methods and designs of both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. But they persisted after the fall of both and have been given an enormous boost by the terrorist threat. These factors have probably contributed to the veritable national compulsion for watching, spying, and wanting to stick one’s nose into everyone else’s business–often with the help of modern technology and using monitoring equipment of all sorts–at the organizational, institutional, and individual levels that currently characterizes the entire United States, all the supposed preoccupation with privacy notwithstanding.

At the upstate New York public school where I taught in the fifties, I was told by several of the students, one of whom was savvy about such equipment, that the public address system, which had a loudspeaker in each classroom, was a two-way one, and the principal could listen in on it. At the time, being a novice to the ways of this country, what with its reputation for openness, I doubted the truth of this assertion. Today I tend to believe it.

In theory at least, teaching evaluations by students have much to recommend them. The students’ names are kept secret, the plausible logic behind this being that they must be protected from retaliation by the instructor. But during my tenure at Washington State University this resulted in the opposite wrong: evaluations often amounted to slander, some students taking advantage of their anonymity. They would even resort to egregious lies. The terms they used were often borrowed from the police blotter, with which they seemed eerily familiar. Their approach attested to an environment where alcoholism, drug addiction, and violence were rampant. The instructors’ competence only marginally had to d

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