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Because today is Constitution Day, I figured it would appropriate to share a few reflections on what it is to be an American. Apparently that's a thing these days! But in fact it's been a thing since at least 1781, when J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur published his essay What Is an American.
Coincidently, before learning that this is a hot topic, my recent reading had already included a book by John Kouwenhoven entitled The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on What's American about America, first published in 1961. Kouwenhoven's work is mentioned with fair frequency by Albert Murray, whose own insights are quite relevant to the matter at hand.
The results of a recent YouGov poll indicate that people think the most important factors in considering whether someone is an American are obeying U.S. laws, supporting the U.S. Constitution, and believing in the principles of the Declaration of Independence. That's not a bad start because the Declaration and the Constitution are the intellectual heritage of all Americans, but it seems to me (and seemed to Kouwenhoven and Murray) that American identity goes deeper than that.
Murray held that "the basic elements of American behavior" are "improvisation, frontier experience, resilience"; it is this attitude of affirmation in the face of adversity that has brought about "the orchestration of a veritable jam session of dissonant colonial voices into a constitutional democracy" (isn't that a beautiful image?). Similarly, Kouwenhoven wrote that America is not a finished product but an ever-changing process of aliveness: a flexible way of handling experience rather than a fixed and immutable ideal (not even the ideal expressed in the Declaration, which you'll note is all about the pursuit of happiness rather than a particular outcome that applies to everyone). The music of America is, as Whitman put it in one of the central poems of Leaves of Grass, the song of the open road.
Indeed, it strikes me that we Americans are not an ethnos - not a people in the sense that the Danes or Egyptians or Koreans or Ukrainians are a people. Aside from the long-suffering American Indians, no American's ancestors were here more than 400 years years ago; and most Americans' ancestors are a mongrel mix of folks from all over the planet. As Murray once put it, Americans are citizens of the world because the world came to America; or as Kouwenhoven once put it, Americans aren't rooted in one place or ethnicity but culturally are perpetually on the move down Walt Whitman's open road, or perhaps Mark Twain's ever-flowing Mississippi River.
Because old man river just keeps rolling along, immigrants the world over are forever welcome to put in and paddle downstream as they add their thoughts, commitments, art, music, foods, deeds, and lifeways to the great stream that is American culture and the American future.
Yes, America has great ideals and foundations, but it's our never-ending process of living up to those ideals and building atop those foundations that makes American identity so distinctive in world history. Or so it seems to me.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
In Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, the villainous intellectual Ellsworth Toohey shamelessly states his attitude to other people: "I play the stock market of the soul - and I sell short." Because you can't go too far wrong by doing the exact opposite of what a wicked character like Toohey does, I've been thinking about what it means to buy long in human relationships.
In Rand's later writings, she enunciated what she called "The Trader Principle", in which people "exchange value for value" in their relationships. Leaving aside the questionable status of the word 'value' in ethics (see my 2024 post on Hannah Arendt's contrast between value and worth), it seems to me that Rand doesn't go far enough here - for the truly anti-Toohey stance is not merely to trade but to actively invest in other people.
Think, for instance, of Warren Buffett's approach to investing at Berkshire Hathaway: in many cases he hasn't merely purchased stock in other companies, but instead has purchased the entire company! Similarly, venture capital firms pour their own money into early stage companies, which means they are invested in the success of those companies.
In his book Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre describes aspects of what it's like to invest in another person:
Each of us achieves our good only if and insofar as others make our good their good by helping us through periods of disability to become ourselves the kind of human being - through the acquisition and exercise of the virtues - who makes the good of others her or his good, and this not because we have calculated that, only if we help others, will they help us, in some trading of advantage for advantage.
Although MacIntyre's phrasing is rather academic, his point is clear enough, even if I prefer Walter Kaufmann's formulation: through mutual love and care we are "gradually led to more and more profound concern about the loved one's feelings, thoughts, and welfare."
Yet I think we can go beyond even MacIntyre or Kaufmann. Concern is one thing, but the long-term practice of love and friendship (φιλία) gets closer to the heart of things. To capture the essence of this practice, Aristotle used the little Greek word συζῆν: sharing in the activities of living, jointly pursuing fulfillment, making commitments together, taking action together, supporting each other's projects, celebrating each other's successes, supporting each other in times of trouble, feeling with and for each other, thinking things through together, seeking each other’s counsel, treating your shared life as one long conversation and intermingling of souls.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
While reading yet another book by Pierre Hadot recently, I came across a fascinating passage from the ancient Greek writer Plutarch about philosophy as a way of life. Here's the crux of it, in my own translation:
Socrates indeed was a philosopher, even though he didn't set out benches for students or hold court in a special chair or observe set times for discoursing or walking around with pupils; instead, as chance may have it, he feasted with people, drank with them, served in the army with some of them, hung around in the marketplace with them, and in the end was locked up and drank the poison - yet he was the very first person who showed forth at all times, in all respects, in all experiences, in all activities that plainly and simply living is itself engaging in the love of wisdom.
The ancient Greeks were not the only ones to whom this idea occurred. Over 1500 years after the death of Socrates, the great Zen Buddhist thinker Dōgen formulated his conception of the unity of practice and fulfillment (shushō-ittō): if done with the right awareness and presence, anything we do - chopping wood, carrying water, cooking, cleaning, walking, sitting quietly - can count as a realization of the Way. We don't need to wait years and years to achieve enlightenment, because if we approach living in the right frame of mind then enlightenment is right here, right now, inside us and all around us.
Living wisdom is the highest form of loving wisdom.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
The United States has all of the complexities of all the other nations in the world, and also many of its own...
~ Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans
Reading about American history and culture is forever fascinating. Of late I've been focused on learning about various immigrant groups, from monumental ones like the English and the Africans (explained so well by David Hackett Fischer in his books Albion's Seed and African Founders) to relatively unknown ones like the French Huguenots who migrated to Boston, New York, and South Carolina in the 1690s and the Canary Islanders who settled in southern Louisiana under Spanish rule from 1778 to 1783. America has experienced dozens of such migrant streams, each consisting of atypically adventurous people and each adding its distinctive flavor to the gumbo of American culture. Indeed, as Walt Whitman observed in his 1855 poem Great Are the Myths, America is "the nation of clusters of equal nations"; Frederick Douglass echoed Whitman in his 1869 speech Our Composite Nation; and Albert Murray renewed these insights in his 1970 book The Omni-Americans, wherein he argued that American culture is inherently composite, pluralistic, mulatto.
Not infrequently one hears wistful calls for America to be a more tolerant and kindly place, typically along the lines of a nice Scandinavian country like Denmark. While I'm all in favor of moderation and brotherhood, my impression of Denmark (never having visited!) is that it is free to be so nice because it lacks some of the complexities we have in America. For instance, with only six million people (the same as here in Colorado), most of whose ancestors have lived there for a thousand years or more, Denmark is likely less ethnically composite today than America was even in 1776, let alone in 2025. Once you tack on the vast geography of America, its regional and local diversity, its numerous cities (42 of which are larger than Copenhagen), its many levels of governance (50 states, 3000+ counties, myriad towns and townships, etc.), its ultra-dynamic economy, its countless businesses winking in and out of existence, its outsized role in world affairs, its freewheeling, rebellious, and often troubled history, and so on, you realize that wishing America to be more like Denmark is a pipe dream.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
Over lunch last week, a friend and I had an interesting discussion about the future of computer programming. At his startup, he makes extensive use of machine learning and large language models but still writes plenty of code. He called this "AI-assisted coding", in contradistinction to "vibe coding”, whereby people who don't know how to code ask the LLM chatbot to generate all the code for them. He also noted that when an LLM generates code, you have to get really good at reading code - a skill that even old-style programmers haven't traditionally cultivated or enjoyed.
Our conversation came back to me on reading Arnold Kling's post this morning about the futility of teaching young people to write. The LLMs will soon be better than 90% of human writers, so why teach people to do so? Let the LLMs do the writing and instead teach people how to edit what the LLMs produce!
Yet I suspect that vibe writing will be no more successful than vibe coding, in large measure because reading itself is becoming a lost art. Furthermore, since writing is a form of thinking, if you haven't developed the skill of formalized thinking through writing and reflective reading then your interaction with an AI chatbot will essentially be nothing more than vibe thinking.
This will not end well for society. But I, for one, won't go there.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
Cross-pollination is a wondrous thing. Over the last few months I've been reading about two topics that might seem quite far apart: ancient Greek tragedy and American jazz. In the first category, I'm working my way through all the extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and also reading literary and philosophical analysis of tragic drama, such as Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy. In the second category, I've been reading biographies of great jazz musicians and composers (Armstrong, Ellington, Monk, Mingus, Coltrane, etc.) as well as historical and philosophical analysis of the meaning of jazz and blues in American culture, especially some amazing books by Albert Murray and some essays by Ralph Ellison.
Both Murray and Ellison (who happen to have been close friends) touch on similarities and differences between tragedy and the blues. Here's Ellison from his 1945 essay "Richard Wright's Blues"...
Let us close with one final word about the blues: their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self.
In his books Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, and The Blue Devils of Nada, Murray goes even farther: he argues that the purpose of blues music is to stomp on blues feelings in such an earthy yet elegant way that our fears and sorrows are transformed (even if only temporarily) into an aesthetic celebration of resilience and spontaneity. The essence of blues and jazz is, he says, "improvisation in situations of disruption" and "affirmation in the face of adversity" (conditions that any honest reader of American history knows were faced in abundance by the descendents of captive Africans who invented these musics in the first place).
As I reflect more deeply on these topics, I might even write a longer essay for publication. Stay tuned!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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