Why We Cannot Build Each Up: An Open Response

A friend of mine - an old one, a very dear one, posted on Facebook something to the effect of  "Americans have shown how much they are able to tear each other down.  Are they able to show how much they can build each other up?"  He is someone whom I respect immensely:  he is intelligent, wise, a deep thinker, and very knowledgeable about many things. That said, of course, any sort of discussion on social media almost immediately devolves into a heated name calling argument, so posting an actually response would be fruitless.  But here is what I would have said to him, had I been willing to engage into No Man's Land called political on-line discussions:

Dear X:

I cannot tell you how much I deeply appreciate your question, can Americans show how much they can build each other up?  I appreciate it both because of the intellectual integrity I believe you have and the fact that, simply put, almost no-one is asking the question.

In reply I can only offer a comment and a question.  My comment is no, I do not think we can build each other up in the way you are asking.  Why?  Because what does it mean to be an American?

We have become a society of divisiveness - to the point that we can almost not talk to each other.  We identify by race, by gender, by preferred sexual orientation, by political beliefs, by economic beliefs, by religious beliefs - in fact, if there is a way to identify into a subgroup, we have found it.  This sort of divisiveness - I suppose it could be termed "diversity", although diversity should in theory not be divisive - never really works for the nation state or really any sort of human organization, unless there is an underlying set of beliefs or assumptions that bind us together.  We are Y, because we are not Z.

If you can accept a rather poor analogy, it is like a family:  a group of people that may love each other or quibble and fight and call each other horrible names (and maybe not talk to each other in years) but have the underlying identification that they belong to this family and not another one.  It is our tribe, the point by which we differentiate ourselves from the world in that even though we are very different, we share at least that one identifying characteristic.

I then ask the simply question:  what is that defining characteristic or characteristics that makes us Americans?

One could argue that at one point it encompassed a shared set of beliefs about who we were and what we believed (keep in mind that for the political geographer, a nation (group of people) must have a shared culture, a shared language, and a shared origin).  Now many would argue that in point of fact that set of beliefs was incredibly narrow minded and not representative of who we actually were and that point can be debated.  What is important is that on the whole America believed it held them, even if it was not in practice.

What binds us together today?  From what I can see, very little.  We, on the whole, share only the space that we live in and the laws that we live under.  Everything else has become highly fragmented and isolated.  We find our "group", and then try to form the world to conform with what the group believes.  We have largely lost the ability to live and let live: we now live in a new age of clans and tribes, constantly seeking to do battle (thankfully only by words written and spoken at this point) with everyone around us.  We are the confederation of Celts before the arrival of Gaius Julius Caesar:  a large group of people in a large territory that would just as soon fight each other as fight against an outsider.

What would it take to change this?  I fear that task has slipped beyond any of us at this point because it would require two things.  The first is that it take a consensus on what it actually means to be an American.  Maybe that has changed over the years or maybe we have become so used to what we enjoy that we forget that we need to rededicate ourselves to such things on a regular basis.

But assuming we could reach a consensus, the second item looms in the way.  We would have to learn to accept a limitation of our influence.

Every group in the U.S. seeks to make the country into a vision of what it sees.  Anything that does not fit into that mold must be destroyed.  What I am suggesting is that different groups, even ones diametrically opposed to each other, would have to learn to accept and live with each other.  If one side believed A, B would have to accept this but also in practice agree to let A believe otherwise and not attempt to impose their vision of the world on them. 

(There is an addendum to this point as well:  every one would have to learn to forgive what has been said and written and (in some cases done).  This is an addendum of course, because in point of fact those that learn to live together in toleration if not amity can learn to let the past go.)

Building someone else up means wanting the best for them, even if the best is success above you or beyond you.  It means willing good, and being willing to see good occur without anger or regret or a coveting of that success for one's own (and then trying to bend the world to make it that way). 

As you might have guessed, I think we are far beyond this point now and have argued for some time that an amicable divorce would be better than the nasty and drawn out divorce I fear is coming (in fact, I have argued the point for a while some years, a Cassandra on the fringes of the Interweb). Why not simply accept the fact that historically this nation-state is over (it does happen, of course - someone born early in the last Century could have lived through three states:  The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, and Slovakia or Tsarist Russia, The Soviet Union, and The Russian Federation) and try to manage the process instead of continuing to tighten the pressure lid down until it boils over?

Sometimes, the best one can do is manager the dissolution of the company or marriage or denomination and work to build a different, better one.

Your Obedient Servant,

Toirdhealbheach Beucail