Here’s a joke. Go ahead and laugh, before we get to serious matters of patriotism, immigration, and grit:
Two New Jersey hunters are in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911. He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is silence. Then a shot is heard. Back on the phone the guy says, “Okay, now what?”
If you laughed hard, you may be German. If you didn’t laugh at all, you may be Canadian. A study by psychologist Richard Wiseman collected forty thousand jokes and 2 million opinions from around the world to declare this hunting tale “the world’s funniest joke.”1 The study clearly showed that Germans laughed most often. This is a controversial finding, not because we doubt German humor—Nietzsche, the man who came up with the idea of the Übermensch, went crazy after hugging a horse in the street and spent the rest of his life prancing naked in his own autoerotic Dionysian rite.2 Now, that’s funny. Wiseman’s finding is controversial because it is politically incorrect to assert that a people possess a “national character” or personality. Critics of “national character” claim that such discussions simply breed or reflect stereotypes that can dehumanize individuals and turn anthropology and political science into an extended Don Rickles stand-up routine: “I saw this black guy chasing two Irishmen into a bar . . .”
Many of us find ethnic jokes embarrassing and the nastiest ones downright detestable. But our sensitivities do not mean that we are wrong to perceive differences in attitudes and behavior. My German-born neighbor who lives down the street is prompt. To him, “fashionably late” means “on time.” My father and his father also liked to be early. We were always the first family to check in at an airport, sometimes arriving before the plane had even left its previous destination. The motto on the Buchholz family crest should have been “Hurry up and wait.” Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reached bestseller lists in 2011 with scary tales of threatening to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals in retaliation for a poor piano practice session. Chua’s “mommy dearest” stories were rather gothic, but serious social psychologists do find that Asian families tend to use shaming as a way to encourage modesty and to develop self-discipline and responsibility.3 The results of shaming later show up in adult behavior. For example, Asian Americans are more likely than non-Hispanic white Americans or African Americans to feel suspicious when people laugh in their presence and are more likely to avoid a place after having made an embarrassing impression.4 But whites are more likely to avoid the dance floor, fearing that they will look ridiculous. This is why Billy Crystal got a big laugh in When Harry Met Sally when his character explains dating: “You meet someone, you have the safe lunch. . . . You go dancing, you do the white man’s overbite.”5
Cultural norms, whether homegrown or carried to a country by immigrants, do differ from place to place and people to people. Of course, we must be careful about unfounded biases, but in this chapter I will argue that if a nation wants to survive the gale forces of a swiftly changing economy, it had better convey to its children and to its immigrants a sense of its national character and the rituals and stories that can hold it together. Societies that do not do this die. They leave behind only a clanking cask of skeletal bones and we know little about them. About sixty thousand years ago, several Homo sapiens families walked out of Africa, forming many tribes, societies, and eventually countries. But we really know much only about those that left behind a common creed, a language, founding myths, and a culture. We know just about nothing about the Neanderthals who came before them. We also know very little about the Harappans who lived several thousand years ago in what is now Pakistan and western India. The reason we do not know much is that their scribes apparently had little interest in writing down their myths, literature, or scientific thoughts; their technological advancements in metallurgy; or their use of decimals.6 In contrast, we know much about ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Jews, the “people of the book.” But without their book—packed with customs, commands, and stories—Jews would not have survived five thousand years. They would have been long forgotten, like some isolated Neanderthal clan but without the jutting foreheads. There is no guarantee that even the most robust culture will survive epochs and millennia. The odds are brutally long.
In 1817 the editor of the London Examiner heard that the head of an ancient statue of Pharaoh Rameses II would be shipped to the British Museum. He staged a poetry competition, daring Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend, a doggerel-loving stockbroker named Horace Smith, to quickly pen a sonnet about the old tyrant. Shelley won the competition with a poem called “Ozymandias” (a Greek corruption of part of Rameses’s name). The poem has lasted and has been lauded for two hundred years, so far. In one of the final episodes of the hit television show Breaking Bad, the protagonist recites “Ozymandias.” But the theme of the sonnet is that glory will certainly fade away even for a powerful, arrogant king. Shelley writes of a traveler from an antique land who comes across in the desert “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.” On a pedestal, these words appear:
“MY NAME IS OZYMANDIAS, KING OF KINGS
LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR!”
NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS. ROUND THE DECAY
OF THAT COLOSSAL WRECK, BOUNDLESS AND BARE
THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS STRETCH FAR AWAY.
If even a mighty pharaoh and his formidable civilization crumble to sand, surrounded by nothing in a vast desert, what long-term hope does the United States or any other modern nation have? Let’s take another poem, even more famous than “Ozymandias” and written just a few years before in 1814. A young attorney named Francis Scott Key is aboard a British ship in Baltimore harbor, trying to negotiate the release of hostages. The bombing of Fort McHenry begins, and the Royal Navy fires rockets and over fifteen hundred cannonballs across the harbor. Francis Scott Key writes a poem. The penultimate line we know so well is not a declaration but a question: “Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” Key understood that the answer might be “No!” The United States had declared independence just thirty-eight years before. Countries could die. He knew that the Republic of Belgium lasted just 325 days in 1790. The Republic of Genoa made it through 211 days in 1814. Young countries and old countries could disappear. The Star-Spangled Banner does still wave today. But you can look pretty hard and yet not find any tattered banners of the Harappans or the Minoans. Back to Ozymandias and an irony. The pharaoh had a son who ruled in 1200 BC. In 1896 an archaeologist dug up a ten-foot block of black granite, inscribed with reports of the son’s victorious battles. It also includes an inscription from the great leader. He declares, “Israel is laid waste; its seed is gone.” He was wrong. The people who had a shared book outlasted the king who had soldiers, fortunes, and monuments that scattered when the sirocco winds blew across the Sahara.
So where is hope to be found for rich nations today who must wonder how long they will last? The answer is in a national character and culture and in those shared stories that can bind us together despite the centrifugal force of globalization that flings us apart.7
WHO’S THE STRANGER AND HOW DO WE TREAT HIM?
In an earlier chapter, we looked at William Hamilton’s formula that gauges our willingness to sacrifice for others. Our bodies have evolved so they can identify family. While everyone knows that wolves have a keen sense of scent, so do we when it comes to relatives. Blindfolded, a man can identify his sibling by scent but not a half-sibling. We would dive into swirling waters to save a close family member. As for a stranger, well, he can get chomped on by a shark. Yet a healthy society requires a willingness to take risks and accept losses for others: to fight in battle, pay hefty taxes, or forgo stealing a hundred-dollar bill even if you know you will not be caught. But it is awfully hard to persuade people to sacrifice by appealing only to their reason. On D-Day in 1944, Dwight Eisenhower would not have had a chance of coaxing Army Rangers to climb the hundred-meter-high vertical cliffs of Pointe du Hoc against a storm of Nazi machine-gun fire if he had to supply them with an airtight syllogism churned out by an Aristotelian logician.
Modern nations cannot survive unless people identify some alternative way that binds them together, other than blood and scent. In olden days, the church in the town square could play that role, especially when just one religion dominated a people. Just as Jesus is said to have sacrificed himself for mankind’s sins, a medieval priest could call on his flock to sacrifice for each other. The eighteenth-century hymn “Soldiers of Christ, Arise” follows the teachings of the Apostle Paul and tells good men to “put your armour on,” to fight the devil’s schemes.8 Paul speaks of helmets, breastplates, and swords. Those who would not fight were deemed pagans. Shared religion could substitute for blood and scent. The very word religion comes from the Latin verb religare “to bind.” The root of sacrifice, sacer, means holy. But where does this leave us today, in a country where fewer than 20 percent attend a church service each week? Even more worrisome, an additional 20 percent of the population apparently lies about attending a weekly worship service!9 The attendance numbers are much lower for most of Europe, for example, less than 10 percent in Germany, France, and Scandinavia.10 If a nation no longer embraces holiness from God and no longer cares about the church in the town square, it must look elsewhere to bind itself together, namely in its history, character, culture, and stories.
TURNING CROWDS INTO GROUPS AND NATIONS: A QUICK WASHINGTON TOUR
The word we has a little magic attached to it and makes us feel better. A neat experiment showed that when people see the word we paired up with a made-up word like xeh, they feel more positive about the meaningless xeh.11 Even if we are introverts and loners, we have all experienced moments when a crowd of strangers transforms into a “we” group and feels some connection or affection. On July 4, 2015, I was standing on a lawn in Georgetown with a few thousand strangers watching as fireworks launched from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool soared over a background view of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Watergate Hotel. All of us in the crowd would follow the path of the rocket and simultaneously await the “reveal,” that moment when the explosion of color morphed into the shape of a sunburst, a flag, or a sparkling willow tree. When the rocketeers surprised us with the unmistakable image of a happy face, we all “oohed” and smiled together, sometimes making eye contact with each other. John Adams was awfully smart when he urged that Independence Day should be celebrated with fireworks. On July 3, 1776, he wrote to his wife, Abigail, that it should be celebrated with “Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”12 On the website of the Massachusetts Historical Society, you can see Adams’s handwritten letter and feel yourself in that moment when the United States was newborn and so fragile and hopeful.
Each of the three institutions that provided the backdrop to the fireworks display that day—the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy Center, and Watergate Hotel—has brought strangers together (and divided them) at different times in US history. They are just piles of brick, marble, and mortar and those raw materials could have been used instead to build a strip mall or a sewage plant. Nonetheless, these structures are now imbued with symbolism and therefore help form the infrastructure for America’s soul. Let us start with the Lincoln Memorial. It is not an explicitly religious site, and yet it plays that role to millions of visitors. The epitaph above the statue of the seated Lincoln calls the building a Temple, not a memorial:
IN THIS TEMPLE
AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE
FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION
THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
IS ENSHRINED FOREVER.
In 1963 the Lincoln Memorial was the place, of course, where 250,000 people gathered to hear Martin Luther King declare “I Have a Dream” and sing together “We Shall Overcome.” On a May morning in 1970 at 4:15, President Richard Nixon slipped out of the White House without telling his chief of staff and showed up unannounced at the Lincoln statue to speak quietly to Vietnam War protesters who held a vigil there. It is a reverential place for Americans regardless of their personal political views.
If you stand at the base of the Lincoln Memorial and look to the west, you will see the home of Robert E. Lee looming over Arlington National Cemetery and the 400,000 crosses, Stars of David, crescents (and even a few Wiccan pentacles) marking the grave sites of Americans who died in battle from the Civil War to the latest death in Arabia or Afghanistan.
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts hosts opera, symphony, plays, and dance. It opened in 1971 with Leonard Bernstein’s premiere of his musical-theater piece entitled Mass. This is telling. The musical work includes Latin passages from the Roman Catholic Mass, but also English lyrics by pop star Paul Simon and Stephen Schwartz (later the composer of Wicked). Bernstein was not particularly religious, and according to his biographers, he violated at least a few of the Ten Commandments. In Mass discordant choir members rebel against God and hurl sacramental wine and bread to the floor. But after the choir members fall to the floor, a flute solo resurrects the choir, which somehow regains its faith. The areligious Bernstein ultimately finds harmony and grace in ritual. Bernstein’s handwritten notes from when he was composing Mass contain the following passage: “Some religion necessary to every man—belief in something greater than random/systematic biological existence.”13 The Kennedy Center is an areligious institution. And yet whenever an audience cheers, applauds, or laughs together, it helps to form a community. A shared culture can do this.
We know the Watergate Hotel from the clumsy break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972 and the cover-up by the Nixon White House. The scandal divided the country just as the Vietnam War was already wrenching it apart. But as evidence against Richard Nixon piled up, the American people began to coalesce in a shared view that the president must resign. On August 7, 1974, leading Republican senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott marched into the Oval Office to tell him that he must leave. Even his staunchest allies had moved to form a front against him. When Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president on August 9, he spoke these powerful words: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” Note the word our. Even a scandal like Watergate, a shared nightmare, can help tie a country together. Ford continued, “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him.” In Ford’s speech the Constitution serves as America’s eternal document, like the “book” that ancient Jews would depend on to guide them through internal crises and external attacks.
Shared experiences can also come from less momentous spheres, including sports. At Arlington National Cemetery rests the remains of Joe Louis, who dominated boxing from 1937 to 1949 and is often ranked as the greatest heavyweight champion of all time, despite Muhammad Ali’s colorful rants. In 1936, though, Louis was knocked out by Max Schmeling, a darling of Hitler and poster boy for Aryan superiority. In 1938 nearly every American and every German wanted to tune into the radio broadcast or attend the rematch at Yankee Stadium, alongside seventy thousand other fans. A few weeks before, Louis traveled to the White House. President Franklin Roosevelt said, “Lean over, Joe, so I can feel your muscles. . . . Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany.” Beat Germany? An ominous choice of words. Remember, this fight took place three and a half years before the United States entered World War II and a year before the Nazis invaded Poland. But the pressure was on. Here’s how the fight went: Louis charges Schmeling and in the first two minutes lands a dozen devastating blows to the head. Schmeling’s knees buckle. Louis hits him with a sharp right cross and Schmeling collapses to the canvas. He rolls and rises, only to be knocked down again and to stagger onto his feet once more. Louis fires another right to the jaw and Schmeling crumbles. A white towel of surrender flies into the ring from the German corner, but the referee throws it back. Schmeling does not get up. While, of course, some racist Americans cheered Schmeling, Louis brought millions of Americans together. I was reminded of the power of sports last year, the day after July 4. On July 5, 2015, I was walking through the Baltimore-Washington International Airport when I heard a sudden explosion of cheers. The US soccer team had just kicked the ball past a diving Japanese goalkeeper in the Women’s World Cup final match. Strangers, transients passing through an airport slapped each other and felt an emotional and psychological tie. They formed a group and for a split second, as the ball slipped past the Japanese goalie, felt bonded like a fraternity, sorority, 4-H club, or church choir.
WE ARE NUMBER ONE, OR WAIT ’TIL NEXT YEAR
Sometimes bonding requires identifying a common obstacle or foe and a feeling of superiority. That is certainly the case in war or in a World Cup match. Again, it may be politically incorrect to admit that groups and nations need to feel superior (“ethnocentrism”) but that is the lesson of history, backed up by modern psychological testing. The Jews called themselves the “chosen people,” not the “also-rans.” Many Rastafarians, encouraged by Marcus Garvey, believe that Jah (God) has chosen black people as physically and spiritually superior. People feel better when their group succeeds. Psychologists use the acronym BIRG to describe the tendency for people to “bask in the reflected glory” of their group. After a winning football game, more college students will wear sweatshirts and scarves celebrating their team.14 School songs will often blend battle cries with religious references and declarations of superiority, even in the pursuit of a mere six-point touchdown. I can still recite a fight song from my high school, Toms River High School South, which does all three.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
We hate to beat you but if we must we must.
’Cause east is east and west is west
But we’re from South and South is best!
Somehow along the Jersey Shore, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (“ashes to ashes”) got roped into a tautological geography lesson (“east is east”). Nonetheless, we cheerfully shouted the fight song. And we truly believed that our high school was better than its rivals (it really was!).
Groups like high schools, sororities, fraternities, symphonies, and nations could take a more modest route and simply assert their positive traits without trumpeting greatness or asserting superiority compared with others. But they usually do not take the humble path. Why? Because group identity must boost self-esteem even in bad times. When a team loses a match or a country loses a battle, morale and solidarity fray. Team members and fans feel less attached and are less likely to don team shirts and hold heads high. Defeat serves up the true test of a group’s sustainability. If the group is going to live on, members must be convinced that the defeat is temporary. It is easy to feel good about one’s team or one’s country after a massive victory, but every country and every team loses or suffers embarrassment from time to time. That is a promise that history does not renege on. In March 1942 Japanese military forces pummeled American and Filipino soldiers who tried to defend the Philippines from rockets, bombs, and torpedoes. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the proud and haughty General Douglas MacArthur to abandon his post on the island fortress of Corregidor, leaving behind ninety thousand soldiers who lacked the supplies to combat the Japanese offensive. Many were captured and then forced into the infamous Bataan death march, which killed thousands. Avoiding gunfire, mines, and violent waves, MacArthur and his family traveled over five hundred miles on a small PT boat. MacArthur told the boat commander, “You have taken me out of the jaws of death.” But after making it to Melbourne, Australia, MacArthur uttered his famous phrase, “I shall return.” His soldiers and the American people believed his pledge. Two and a half years later, MacArthur waded ashore to the Philippine Island of Leyte to fulfill his promise. When the Americans captured Manila, he declared, “I’m a little late, but we finally came.” In the next chapter we will see how Alexander the Great used his superior reputation to rally his troops back from defeat.
Asserting superiority (or exceptionalism) allows people to feel that any loss is a temporary setback. “We Shall Overcome” implies a setback but also promises a subsequent triumph. Jewish historians joke that their entire history—pockmarked with killings from Haman to Hadrian to Hitler—can be summed up as “They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.”
In the boxing realm, neither Joe Louis nor Muhammad Ali would have been considered the “Greatest” had Louis not fought back from his defeat by Schmeling and if Ali had not avenged his 1971 loss to Joe Frazier. Boxing historians consistently rank Louis and Ali above Rocky Marciano, the “Brockton Blockbuster,” who dominated heavyweight boxing in the late 1940s and 1950s and retired with forty-nine victories, including forty-three knockouts and not a single loss. But critics gripe that Marciano did not face great competitors on his way to forty-nine straight victories. I would contend that if Marciano had lost and then avenged one brutal slugfest, he would be ranked higher today.
Nearly every group, regardless of the category of endeavor, will assert some real or imagined superiority: Japanese assembly-line workers are better team players; the Seattle Seahawks have a swifter running game; or the New York Philharmonic understands Mahler better than the Philadelphia Orchestra. Abigail Adams must have longed for America when she wrote to her sister from London in 1786 that English birds could not compete with American fowl: “Do you know that European Birds have not half the melody of ours, nor is their fruit half so sweet, or their flowers half so Fragrant, or their Manners half so pure, or their people half so virtuous. But keep this to yourself.”15 Abigail Adams really did think that American birds sang better. No doubt, Keats was tone-deaf in 1819 when he wrote an “Ode to a Nightingale” and in 1961, when Nat King Cole warbled that “a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square,” he should have appended the adverb “badly.” This all seems ridiculous, but it is often necessary, particularly in stressful times.
How does a group respond when faced with undeniable proof that it is not as good as another group? Let’s say that English and American birds have a double-blind sing-off, in which both judges and birds are blindfolded. What would Abigail Adams do if the English birds won? Most likely, she would rationalize the result and suggest some other measure of superiority or provide an excuse for the Americans’ failure. Perhaps the American birds are too deep in original thought to sing a silly song by rote memory, or too devoted to their freedom to warble on command. I knew a college professor who, when seeing a twelve-year-old genius score A’s on college finals, comforted herself by saying, “Well, at least I have a normal social life.” In 1858 Nathaniel Hawthorne traveled to Florence and toured the Uffizi Gallery, which displays works of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael. Hawthorne marveled at the Italians’ “genuine love of painting and sculpture.” But Hawthorne could not simply acknowledge their masterpiece achievements on canvas and in marble. He had to blot them with ink or bile. So in his diaries he contends that Italians produce monumental art precisely because they are moral dwarfs: the Italians are “capable of every social crime, and to have formed a fine and hard enamel over their characters. Perhaps it is because such tastes are artificial, the product of cultivation, and . . . imply a great remove from natural simplicity.”16 In other words, Italian masters paint better because they are dishonest and not blinded by simple truths. We are superior because we are not as handy with a paintbrush.
Like Hawthorne, people will often disparage other groups as more primitive or less bound by moral rules. The Chinese consider the rest of the world barbarians. The ancient Greeks came up with the word barbarian because it sounded like the gibberish spoken by non-Greeks. We convince ourselves that other cultures appear to have looser rules of dress, looser standards of hygiene, and looser women. And they will eat anything! Some Brits still call the French “frogs.” The French have the decency not to ask what is in the dish called spotted dick; the English refer to syphilis as “the French disease” and the French call it “the Italian disease.” Foreigners smell bad, and if they use too much soap or cologne, they smell worse. Crazed mullahs in Iran declare that Christians are really monkeys and pigs in disguise. In Planet of the Apes, the apes sneer at the scent of Charlton Heston until he barks back, “Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”
If a nation does not have a culture that binds people together, we all begin to look at each other as “damned dirty apes.” Military leaders since Thucydides know that they cannot elicit sacrifice and risk taking unless they can turn platoons into brotherhoods. Henry V’s rallying cry at Agincourt, “We few, we happy few, we . . . band of brothers,” inspired a puny assembly of English forces to trounce the heavily armored knights of France. Henry promises that “he to-day that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother; be he never so vile.” Of course, these words are really Shakespeare’s, not the historical king’s. But scroll ahead three hundred years and you come to a real soldier and a real poet, a young lad named Rupert Brooke, who was called by W. B. Yeats “the handsomest young man in England.” In his 1914 poem “The Soldier,” Brooke writes, “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England.” The soldier’s death sanctifies the land, whether or not the soldier believes in God. An unbreakable trinity forms among the soldier, the land, and his people in England. Let’s add a coda to this poem. Brooke’s poetry was lauded by Winston Churchill, who was serving as first lord of the admiralty during the Great War. Brooke joined the Royal Navy in 1914 and sailed toward Greece to join the Battle of Gallipoli (which I’ll discuss in chapter 7). He contracted an infection along the way and died on a ship in the Aegean Sea. He was buried in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, Greece, on April 23, 1915. At 11 that evening a six-foot-deep rectangle of earth became, by his logic and his sacrifice, a part of England.
CHOOSE PATRIOTISM OR NARCISSISM
Pollyanna types might say that groups and nations should just be modest and surrender any drive to feel superior. But that, too, poses a serious risk. Certainly, the untouchables in India did not benefit by accepting their inferior status. These so-called polluted people were barred even from wearing sandals in front of higher-caste members, much less sharing cups, tables, or burial grounds with them. At the other end of the spectrum, hypersuperiority can stir trouble, or even genocide, as the Nazis taught us. But the lesson from the Nazis and Japanese fascists in World War II is to beware of claims of conquest based on bloodlines. The patriotism of the American Revolution was based not on blood but in fact on principles of liberty and the dilution of pure bloodlines (with the exception of slaves, of course). The Constitution’s system of checks and balances gives a clear signal that no man, and no single institution, has the ultimate claim on truth and power. We see this in the papers of James Madison, in Gerald Ford’s first words as president, and even in comic movies. In one monologue in the movie Stripes, Bill Murray’s louche character encapsulates the principles above, namely that (1) America’s greatness is not based on a pedigree and (2) a belief in greatness means that Americans can climb back from defeats:
Cut it out! . . . We’re all very different people. We’re not Watusi. We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A,’ huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts! . . . We’re soldiers, but we’re American soldiers! We’ve been kickin’ ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and 1! . . . All we have to do is to be the great American fighting soldier that is inside each one of us. Now do what I do, and say what I say. And make me proud.17
Most individuals harbor a natural wish to feel superior. Sigmund Freud thought we even puffed up the reputations of our ancestors, calling it the “family romance” fallacy. The nineteenth-century British economist and social philosopher Nassau William Senior lamented the unstoppable “desire for distinction . . . that comes with us from the cradle and never leaves us till we go into the grave.”18 Sometimes the quest for individual superiority can hurt others. Economists like Robert H. Frank of Cornell contend that we are engaged in a fruitless competition, not just to keep up with the Joneses but to trample them, which leads to envy and despair.19 The desire for superiority shows up in spheres far beyond economics, business, and sports. What is sibling rivalry but the urge to show Mother or Father that I am better than my brother or sister? The old cry from the bicycle-riding kid, “Look, Ma, no hands!” is another way of shouting, “The other kids need to hold on, but I’m better!”
Here is the danger I see when we forbid or trample on a group’s or a nation’s natural wish to feel superior: individuals will turn the drive toward superiority inward and turn more narcissistic. In the United States, patriotism has fallen as narcissism has risen. The public school day used to begin not just with the Pledge of Allegiance but with “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” or “America the Beautiful.” In many schools, those songs have been dropped in favor of slogans taped to the walls to build self-esteem, announcing “EVERYBODY IS A STAR!” In my garage are stacks of trophies won by my daughters for playing soccer and softball. Please note, I did not say they have trophies for winning, simply for playing. They probably amassed more trophies than my grandpa Bobby, who boxed, played center on his basketball team, and won the New York City tennis championship. Poor Grandpa should have waited until the 2000s, instead of competing in Calvin Coolidge’s day. In the comic movie Meet the Fockers, Robert De Niro’s character mocks Ben Stiller’s: “I didn’t know they made ninth-place ribbons.”
We have diminished the esteem of the country and instead focused on the self-esteem of the individual. Some preschools have replaced the lyrics of “Frère Jacques” with the words “I am special, I am special, look at me.” There are at least three things wrong with this switch. First, teachers have lost the chance to teach a bit of a foreign language. Second, they have replaced “brother” with “I,” losing warm fraternal feelings. Third, they have turned toddlers into egotists. Not every finger-painted smudge by a four-year-old deserves to be ogled or stuck to the refrigerator by a magnet made in art class. The best way to develop self-esteem is to do something worthy of esteem. Imagine Henry V’s speech at Agincourt if he could not pledge his life to the “band of brothers,” but instead could refer only to a bunch of “special” youngsters.
In the 1960s Hasbro came up with the idea of G.I. Joe, defying the marketing geniuses who said that boys would not play with dolls. Hasbro showed that if you put a toy grenade or sword in the hands of a doll, the boys will happily stage battle scenes. I cannot locate the talking G.I. Joe that I carried to elementary school, but I can easily recall the urgent lines he would shout when I tugged on the dog tag chain: “Enemy planes! Hit the deck!” and “Medic, medic, get that stretcher out here!” Though the G.I. Joe brand is quite valuable and recent movies called G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe: Retaliation have sold nearly $700 million of tickets at the box office, I doubt that the term “G.I. Joe” would take off if it were coined today. “G.I.” stands for “government issue.” “Joe” was a just a generic folksy name, like “buddy” or “fella.” Here’s a test: gather a bunch of seventy-year-old men around a table, point to one with a smile, and say, “He’s a regular Joe.” The chosen chum will likely smile back and accept the compliment. Try the same tactic with a twenty-year-old and you will hear “Red Alert” alarms and talking G.I. Joes will scream “Battle stations!” No twentysomething wants to be called a “regular Joe.” In the 1950s a young man who stepped out of line would be slapped on the head by his father, teacher, or coach and asked in a biting tone, “What do you think you are—special?!” A study of nearly 800,000 books published between 1960 and 2008 showed that recent writers typed individualistic words and phrases like “standout,” “I come first,” and “I have my own style” about 20 percent more often, and 42 percent more often among novelists.20 Perhaps Americans should perceive our liberty, not our individual selves, as very special.
People raised in the era of the selfie who design their own computer avatars often feel too special for generic titles. Kids and adults often craft for themselves an online world that is downright pre-Copernican—it all revolves around them: their fun, their hobbies, their circle of friends. Some will even sacrifice friends in order to stay in the center of their own solar system. A survey of fifteen hundred adult women showed that one in four had tagged on Facebook an unflattering photo of a friend (presumably to make themselves appear more attractive). If the friend asked them to remove the ugly photo, 20 percent refused.21
Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, studied surveys conducted among college students over the past sixty years. In the 1950s only 12 percent of teens agreed with the statement “I am an important person.” By the 1980s 80 percent ticked that box.22 More young people than ever before agree with this staggering boast: “If I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat.” No doubt, young narcissists would imagine themselves swanning through the first-class salons alongside the Astors rather than trapped in steerage with the unwashed masses, who looked nothing like Leonardo DiCaprio.
WHAT IS THE AMERICAN CHARACTER?
If we can excuse the drive to feel superior, what should Americans feel superior about? We certainly should not claim mastery of everything and we should not deny our faults. Ben Franklin touted the symbol of the turkey above the bald eagle because the turkey is “tho’ a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.” In contrast, Franklin thought the bald eagle was a “bad moral Character,” a coward in the face of sparrows and a thief who steals food from the hardworking fish hawk.23 We could, of course, cite great victories and displays of courage, for instance, Bunker Hill and the Battle of the Bulge. We could speak of displays of magnanimity, including the Marshall Plan or technological achievements such as landing a man on the moon or low-flow flush toilets. But these are notable events and accomplishments, not characteristics of a people. When patriots speak of “American exceptionalism,” I would nominate three elements to define our national character, elements that we can list under the memorable acronym GMC. They are Grit, Mobility, and Confidence. As the preceding chapters described, each of these elements has been eroding. Americans appear to work less and try less hard (grit). They are stuck in place literally and figuratively (mobility); young people are less willing to take a chance and move across state or county lines to take a job. A lack of grit and mobility bespeaks a faltering confidence. In 2015, despite a low (official) unemployment rate just above 5 percent, over two-thirds of Americans told pollsters that the United States was headed in the “wrong direction.” The three characteristics—Grit, Mobility, and Confidence—must be resuscitated, or the body politic may die. Other nations might exalt other characteristics and more highly rank, for example, thriftiness, kindness, or a passion for artisanal foods. These may all be noble and admirable. But GMC made America. If Americans cannot rediscover these characteristics in their land today, how can immigrants possibly locate them when they arrive by plane, truck, and ship?
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GRIT?
In addition to a legitimate court system and a dependable currency, a cohesive country needs a population that displays grit. Grit is not simply the title on a John Wayne movie poster. It’s a specific, measurable psychological trait, indicating perseverance, doggedness, and stick-to-itiveness. People with grit fight to attain long-term goals despite obstacles. They blame others less and take responsibility more. Individuals who show grit are more likely to get a job, pay for a house, and raise successful children. Individuals who lack grit struggle to finish school and cannot keep up with credit card debt. So far, studies of grit have focused on individuals. One widely read study by Angela Lee Duckworth, of the University of Pennsylvania, showed that among new West Point cadets, those who score higher on the grit scale are more likely to survive the fearsome “Beast Barracks,” the grueling first-year training that forces cadets to carry forty-five-pound rucksacks while running, climbing, and marching to the beat of somebody else’s drummer.24 Grit better predicts West Point success than measures of IQ, SATs, push-up scores, or even self-discipline. (Of course, we must be careful not to put perseverance on too high a pedestal. Persevering in the face of literally insurmountable odds or infinite costs could be reckless or stupid. A plebe should not stick it out at West Point, if he is better suited by temperament and talent to play the oboe at Juilliard, for example.)
Grit is a national characteristic, not just an individual trait. Countries with grittier populations are less likely play the “blame game” and less likely to go on reckless national spending sprees that bankrupt future generations. Grittier nations extol a degree of self-reliance. A 2013 Cambridge University study explored the psychological concept called “locus of control.” Someone with a low sense of internal control believes that the outside world determines his fate, as if he is a billiard ball suddenly knocked around by other balls and a cue stick. So, “What’s the point of trying if I’m powerless?” The Cambridge study concluded that individuals with a low sense of internal control generally expect the government to solve their problems, since they consider themselves feckless.25 A lack of grit shows up in the growing bureaucracies and debt obligations discussed in chapters 3 and 4. Other countries may have closed the grit gap with the United States, leaving Americans more vulnerable in a competitive global economy.
Historically, Americans have been known for gutsiness. The lyrics of the World War I song “Over There” point to a specifically American characteristic:
Johnnie, get your gun
Johnnie show the Hun you’re a son of a gun
Hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle do or die
Pack your little kit, show your grit, do your bit . . .
Make your mother proud of you and the old Red White and Blue.
In an earlier day American companies and individuals boasted of their perseverance. The Avis car rental company admitted it was “Number 2,” but claimed, “We try harder.” In a memorable advertisement for brokerage house E. F. Hutton, actor John Houseman intoned, “We make money the old-fashioned way—we earn it.” European nations used to sneer at America’s unceasing work ethic. Contrast the plucky American way of thinking to the high-brow British approach. At prestigious Balliol College, Oxford, the semiofficial motto is “effortless superiority.”
Once upon a time Americans didn’t mind sweat and grit but rising incomes in the twentieth century brought a cushier life. In 1900 41 percent toiled on farms.26 By 2000 only 1.9 percent worked in agriculture and that work is much more likely to involve navigating a GPS-enabled John Deere tractor than shoveling hay and manure with a handheld pitchfork. In the twenty-first century we, understandably, expect more rewards for less toil. Let’s go back to the old Sears catalog, as we did in chapter 2. To buy a refrigerator in 1949, a typical worker had to put in 4.5 weeks of labor (before taxes). Today, a much better Sears refrigerator requires about 2.5 days of work. A worker in 1949 labored for 13.5 hours to afford a toaster. Today, a better toaster costs about 1 hour of work. Of course, these are marvelous developments! But such progress inevitably depletes our need to believe in perseverance. In popular culture and the world of self-help, The 8-Minute Abs Workout complements The 4-Hour Workweek. A few years ago, Dell Computer’s popular ad campaign highlighted a slacker who says, “Dude, you got a Dell,” in a laid-back surfer tone, suggesting the Dell laptop was bestowed upon the recipient, not earned.
The short-term, quick-getaway attitude shows up in the corporate boardroom, too, which sends a discouraging message all the way down to the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. Executives often gear themselves for short-run success, not a long-run battle for market share. Corporations will beef up quarterly earnings just as an executive’s stock shares vest, giving him a short-term surge of wealth. No surprise, then, that firms often ignore long-term challenges. Corporations are spending fewer and fewer R&D dollars in the United States, and the United States educates just 4 percent of the world’s engineers.
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd is a former competitive tennis player and an even more competitive executive. When he took over the company in 2006, he immediately slashed salaries, chopped the number of jobs by 10 percent, and set the office lights to shut off automatically at 6 p.m. every day. Wall Street loved the cost-cutting story and pushed up the price of HP shares. But in addition to cutting the office electricity bill, Hurd slashed R&D spending from 9 percent of revenues down to just 2 percent. The demoralized HP engineers and scientists applied for only one-third as many patents. Why did HP sit paralyzed and dumb as Apple triumphed with the iPad? Because HP’s R&D for personal computers had slumped to just seven-tenths of 1 percent of revenues.27 It’s sad to think that Wall Street applauded this vision of the future.
A TOUGHER TIME FOR IMMIGRANTS
If native-born Americans appear less patriotic, more narcissistic, and more devoted to short-term gains than building a long-lasting country, how can we expect more of immigrants? Immigration has become a divisive issue in most wealthy nations, whether legal immigration through the help of crafty lawyers or illegal migration through bribes to “coyotes” who sneak human beings over fences, across barricades, and in the trunks of cars. Not far from my home, near the Marine Base Camp Pendleton, is an immigration checkpoint. Guards stand in the middle of the eight-lane interstate 5 to Los Angeles, staring into car windows and deciding when to pop open a trunk latch or uncover the tarp over the back of a pickup truck. Yellow road signs display the silhouette of a man, woman, and child holding hands running away across a field. The sign has no caption but presumably means, “Don’t run over the fleeing illegals.” Though this book is not devoted to the thorny issue of immigration, immigrants can contribute to the shattering of rich nations—unless they are invited, urged, and even mandated to adopt their new country as their own.
In 1950 nearly 80 percent of foreign-born residents chose to salute the American flag and become US citizens. Since 2000 only half of eligible immigrants have bothered (compared with 89 percent in Canada and 82 percent in Sweden), reports the National Academy of Sciences.28 We can admire them for coming to the United States for jobs. Nonetheless, a vital nation is more than a long lineup of unrelated workers sticking their cards into the boss’s punch clock.
It is easy to be nostalgic about the old immigration waves of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Norwegians who settled in Minnesota and brought horrible-tasting lutefisk; the Italians who brought spaghetti to Philadelphia and Joe DiMaggio to the Yankees; the Chinese who built railroad tracks and concocted a stew to suit simple American tastes and called it chow mein; and the Dutch, who had names like Roosevelt. Of course, every child learns that these groups all faced discrimination, from the “NO IRISH NEED APPLY” signs to the racist hotels that invited the highly paid Al Jolson and Bert Williams to entertain onstage, but might have snuck them out through servants’ entrances after the show. In the 1840s the Know Nothing movement tried to block Catholics from arriving on US shores. Even earlier in our history, Ben Franklin showed his bias. Although Franklin formed one of the first abolitionist movements on behalf of slaves and donated money to a synagogue in Philadelphia, he was severely biased against Protestant Germans. He called them “Palatine Boors” and said they would never adopt the English language or “acquire our Complexion.” Franklin had an odd view of complexion, even insisting that Swedes were swarthy.29 Clearly, he did not foresee a never-ending road tour of screaming blondes in Abba’s Mamma Mia.
These earlier waves of immigrants faced enormous pressure to learn the “American way.” Much of that pressure was internal. The American-born children of immigrants before the 1960s seldom learned the language of their immigrant parents. Many were ashamed that their parents spoke English with an accent. I am not suggesting that they were right to be ashamed. They were wrong. Yet it bespoke an overwhelming desire to embrace their country. The son of Irish parents, George M. Cohan claimed that he was born on the Fourth of July and even inserted his claim in his song “Yankee Doodle Boy.” The grandson of slaves, Louis Armstrong pulled the same patriotic stunt (he was off by a month). Sports stadiums were packed with blue-collar immigrants cheering heroes with “all-American” names like Bronco Nagurski, Babe Zaharias, Hank Greenberg, and Phil Rizzuto. In the opening of Neil Simon’s play Brighton Beach Memoirs the teenaged protagonist is throwing a baseball against the wall of a small house in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood “inhabited mostly by Jews, Irish, and Germans.” He laments his own ethnicity: “How am I ever going to play for the Yankees with a name like Eugene Morris Jerome? You have to be a Joe . . . or a Tony . . . or a Frankie . . . All the best Yankees are Italian . . . My mother makes spaghetti with ketchup, what chance do I have?”30 The point here is that Eugene wants to be better at America’s national pastime, baseball.
There are more serious examples. In the National Portrait Gallery in Washington hangs a colorful painting called Shimomura Crossing the Delaware. Roger Shimomura did not cross the frigid Delaware with George Washington on Christmas night 1776 and he is not found in the iconic 1851 oil painting by the German-born artist Emanuel Leutze. Shimomura’s cartoonish version, in the style of a woodblock print, depicts Washington’s colonial troops as samurai warriors in kimonos. Shimomura, who was taken with his family from their home in Seattle during World War II and forced to relocate to an Idaho internment camp, makes the following point: even though we were not literally fighting with George Washington, we, too, are Americans and entitled to claim him and his daring as our own. This was poignantly true of the second-generation Japanese who fought with the mighty and highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Most of the young soldiers faced down Nazi machine-gun fire and tank shells in Italy and France, while their parents lived in internment camps back in the United States. The fourteen thousand Nisei soldiers earned nearly ten thousand Purple Hearts.
War is hell. Trenches and tanks do, however, help integrate disparate people. Eighteen percent of the US soldiers in World War I were foreign born, compared with about 15 percent of the population.31 Italian Americans made up 12 percent of the army.32 Today, 4.8 percent of active military personnel are foreign born and 11 percent are of Hispanic descent.33 Dozens of war movies have been made, featuring a mix of ethnicities forced into the same trench, submarine, or platoon. In one well-told story from 1917 a staff sergeant calls the tongue-twister roll at Camp Meade in Maryland and not a single man recognizes his own name. Then the sergeant sneezes and ten recruits step forward. In a sequel to Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, entitled Biloxi Blues, the character goes off to basic training in Mississippi, where he finally learns the diversity of the country. First he confronts the southern climate: “Man it’s hot. It’s like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot.” Then he meets his bunkmates: Roy Selridge, a smelly guy from Schenectady who has “cavities in nineteen out of thirty-two teeth”; Joseph Wykowski, who has a “permanent erection”; and Arnold Epstein, an intellectual with intestinal gas. A motley crew, but they could not be more American. And if you can imagine them fighting side by side, you can see the truth behind Herman Melville’s line, “You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.”34 The US government used words, music, and art to encourage this sentiment. If I had to nominate the two most famous illustrations of America’s founding I would choose Emanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware and Howard Chandler Christy’s Scene of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Christy, who began his career by illustrating scenes of Teddy Roosevelt on San Juan Hill, was commissioned by New York Congressman Sol Bloom to paint the founding fathers, all white Protestants, except for one Catholic. But in 1919, soon after World War I, Christy painted a more diverse portrait for the US Treasury’s Victory bonds, which now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. It is called Americans All! and features an elegant woman in a low-cut yellow gown clutching the American flag in one hand and raising up high a laurel wreath in the other. Under the wreath is an “Honor Roll” of names, and the names sound as if they were plucked randomly at the docks of Ellis Island: “DuBois, Smith, O’Brien, Cejka, Hauke, Pappandrikopolous, Adrassi, Villotto . . . Gonzales.”
The phrase “melting pot” comes from a play that predates Biloxi Blues by about seventy years. Israel Zangwill’s 1908 smash-hit drama The Melting Pot brings David, a Russian Jew, and Vera, a Russian Orthodox Christian, together in love under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty.35 David tells Vera to listen to the “bubbling,” as “Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian—black and yellow” unite and “look forward!” Sociologists debate whether the melting pot is an appropriate metaphor and many suggest a “salad bowl” or some kind of goulash, where flavors and ingredients never really meld.36 Regardless of the metaphor one plucks from The Joy of Cooking, the challenge to create and rouse an American character has grown more severe and also more urgent. We face here another paradox: while the very richness of a nation makes it more difficult for immigrants to assimilate, it makes it easier for the nation to unravel.
Let’s take a look at three factors, calluses, cacophony, and communication. During the great immigration waves prior to World War II, immigrants had calluses on their hands. So did most native-born workers. In 1900 69 percent of the US working population toiled on farms, in forests, and in factories, or crawled down mine shafts.37 When immigrants arrived, they quickly learned how to put their calloused hands to work, even if they faced discrimination from unions and bosses. My grandpa Sam used to say that when Irish immigrants stepped off the boat in Manhattan, they were offered a choice: “A hook or a club?” meaning they could haul boxes off ships as a longshoreman (the hook), or apply for a job as a policeman (the club). The barrier to entry was not physical or economic; it was political. The Irish dominated New York City politics and unions. Nor was the barrier educational. In 1900 fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school and fewer than 3 percent graduated from college. By the end of the twentieth century, 83 percent graduated from high school and 25 percent from college. These days an immigrant arriving from a country that has not yet gone through the Industrial Revolution, much less the Semiconductor Revolution, is far less likely to find work side by side with a native-born American in the service sector, where literacy, numeracy, and interpersonal skills like salesmanship and marketing are highly prized.
When America was poorer, immigrants created a cacophony of noise, as peddlers squawked their wares on the streets speaking their native Italian, Polish, and Cantonese dialects. The unsmiling schoolmarms in Brooklyn and the Bronx, frequently of Irish descent in the early 1900s, had no patience to teach in foreign languages. Even if they wanted to, it would have been impossible. Likewise, the students themselves realized that they would have to learn English in order to get along. Young David Sarnoff, an immigrant from Russia, taught himself English while hawking newspapers next to a streetcar stop; found a job with the Marconi telegraph company; and then helped found RCA and the NBC radio and television networks.38 If Sarnoff had not bothered to learn English, we might still be staring at Edison’s spinning phonograph coils. Today it is easier for immigrants to avoid English, especially because the cacophony has quieted down. In 1910 every language that immigrants spoke was a minority tongue. None had a big enough “market share” to dominate and create a massive, durable enclave (Germans made up a plurality of 18 percent). Princeton sociologist Alejandro Portes has coined the term “segmented assimilation” to describe immigrants who integrate into a single part of American society rather than into the mainstream community. This has become easier because Spanish so dominates among recent immigrants. Mexico alone accounts for 29 percent of immigrants, and the proportion of Spanish-speaking immigrants now reaches about one-half.39 Portes, a Cuban immigrant himself, worries about “enclaves” where immigrants can be too comfortable with the tongue of their homeland: “You could be born into a Cuban clinic, be employed in a Cuban factory or enterprise, and be buried in a Cuban cemetery.”40 During 2013 the Spanish-language network Univision beat out English-language networks FOX, NBC, CBS, and ABC in prime-time ratings among eighteen- to forty-nine-year olds.41 Arguably, there is a lack of diversity among recent immigrants, and we might be better off with a blaring cacophony among arrivals.
Third, computers are everywhere: in offices, homes, phones, and wristwatches. The price of communication has plummeted, leading to the “death of distance.” Our grandparents used to cut off phone conversations for fear that the bill from Ma Bell would drain their life savings. Most people today do not even know how much it costs them to call across state or national lines. Even among poor families in 2014, 85 percent owned cell phones and 77 percent used the Internet.42 Those numbers keep climbing. This is wonderful, though it brings up a first-world problem: why would an immigrant cut off ties to his homeland and dedicate himself to a new place? Like communication costs, transportation costs have plummeted in inflation-adjusted terms over the last century. Because Charles Lindbergh did not auction off his passenger seat in 1927, it is difficult to calculate airline costs over the last ninety years, but since 1978 airfares have dropped about 50 percent. When I travel in the United States, I often ask foreign-born taxi and Uber drivers how often they go back to their homeland. Based on my simple survey, I would say immigrants from Asia and Africa return every two to three years, unless they fled particularly violent places and are frightened to return. A pair of professors at Bergen Community College in New Jersey wrote that many of their students “literally lead a double life, a negotiation between the place of their birth and their adopted home in America.”43 This double life shows up in the most basic life questions: Where should I get married? Where should they bury me when I’m dead? Immigrants a hundred years ago did not flinch. Most could not afford to go back either to visit or to get buried. In the early 1900s immigrant groups often formed jointly funded burial societies named after their village birthplace, because grave sites in American cities were expensive to keep up without sharing costs. Like Dracula, who always carried with him soil from Transylvania as a token of his roots, immigrants in 1900 kept only symbols of their homeland. Most could neither afford nor imagine arranging dual citizenship or dual loyalties. In contrast, in 1996 more than half the Dominicans and Mexicans who died in New York City were flown or shipped home for burial, as were one-third of the Ecuadoreans, according to city death records.44 With transport and communication costs so relatively low, why not splurge on a final, long ride home?
THE HARDENING OF NATIVES
Because they perceive new immigrants as less devoted to their new country, many native-born American and European citizens have hardened their views. They are not as welcoming because they are not as confident that immigrants will accept and embrace their new country. By appealing to anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic sentiment, the recently created UK Independence Party quickly became the third largest party in the country and a serious force that worries the Tories.45 In the United Kingdom and in the United States, over 70 percent of the population would like to slash or better control immigration.46 Some of this sentiment (especially in Europe) comes from national security fears and intensifies whenever there is a bombing traced to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. Baby boomers and their parents are most distressed by high immigration levels, with about 80 percent wanting to reduce immigration to the United Kingdom. As I discussed in chapter 1, the populations of rich nations are getting older and, as they age, people tend to become less open to making new friends or changing their ways. In a New York Times feature article, an Arizona college student said that immigration is the “rare, radioactive topic that sparks arguments with her liberal mother and grandmother.” A Florida college student said that discussing immigration with older relatives was like “hitting your head against a brick wall.”47 No doubt, her older relatives would like to build a stronger and taller brick wall on the southern border. The article reminds me of a couple I knew when I was a little kid. An Italian family, the Gavonas, lived down the street. At Christmastime, Mr. Gavona, a man in his fifties, would dress as Santa Claus and ride on a fire truck, tossing candy to neighborhood kids. A few times, my brother and I got to ride on the back of the fire truck and help. (I remember being disappointed when on a particularly warm December day, Mr. Gavona pulled off the fake beard so he could breathe better.) Each year when my parents would take a parents-only vacation, my Aunt Kay would stay at our house and watch over us. And each year the doorbell would ring and Mrs. Gavona would deliver to us a big pan of homemade manicotti, made with ricotta cheese. We would thank her with hugs. But we hated her cooking and after we’d watch her walk away down the path, we would, in an annual ritual, march to the bathroom and flush away the Gavona manicotti. They were good people, the Gavonas. Generous, caring, welcoming to new neighbors in the community. Then something changed. As we got older and as the Gavonas got older, they stopped sharing such kindnesses. We neighborhood kids would play baseball on a vacant lot near their house. When someone hit a home run or if a sharp grounder sliced through some bushes, the ball would roll into their yard. Mrs. Gavona would come out of her house and take the ball. If we trod on their grass to fetch the ball ourselves, Mr. Gavona would yell, “Get off the lawn!” To them we had turned into threatening pests. Meanwhile, we saw them as grumpy, old folks who did not remember what it was like to be young and frisky. “Whatever happened to Santa?” we wondered.
Our relations with the Gavona family match the history of immigration in America. At times, the United States has welcomed immigrants, and all sorts of support groups with names like the North American Civic League and the YMCA have sprung up to help them learn English and learn about democracy. But in more recent years, despite larger numbers of immigrants, many Americans sound more like the later-day Gavonas yelling, “Get off my lawn!” In fact, it is hard to make a case against tighter immigration controls without sounding like a grumpy old man who forgot what it is like to be young, ambitious, and slightly reckless. Instead of “Get off my lawn!” or “Get out of my country!” today’s Gavonas should be shouting something about history and culture, such as “Get to the National Archives and learn to read the Declaration of Independence!”
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO YUGOSLAVIA AND THE HABSBURG GAME SHOW HOST?
A country without a national character, without shared stories and myths, will soon cease to be a nation. Nations face a powerful tendency toward entropy and disorder. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, who shot to international fame in 2000 with his book Bowling Alone, discovered to his dismay that a more heterogeneous community breeds suspicion and spurs people to withdraw from civic life. In diverse communities, inhabitants tend to “distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst . . . to volunteer less, give less to charity.”48 Of all the slogans found on our coins and monuments, perhaps the most difficult motto to live up to may be E pluribus unum (out of many, one). I have had the opportunity to visit several of the nations that had made up the country of Yugoslavia from 1918 until it shattered in 1991: Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yugoslavians, ripped apart by ancient tribal jealousies, used to joke that Yugoslavia had “eight distinct peoples, six nations, four languages, three religions, two alphabets but just one Yugoslav: Marshal Tito.” Following Tito’s death in 1980 all began to fall apart. But Yugoslavia was a minor country, an unreliable Cold War pawn played by both the United States and the USSR.
Instead, let’s learn some lessons from a major global power that tried e pluribus unum, the Habsburg monarchy. As I discussed earlier in this book, the Habsburgs’ domain stretched from Amsterdam to Gibraltar to Bohemia and their leadership was capped by the title Holy Roman emperor. Though the Habsburg family emerged from a Swiss castle to rule Austria in 1279, a succession of carefully orchestrated marriages later lured into the family Isabel and Ferdinand’s daughter Joan from Spain, along with the sons and daughters of nearly every other ruling family in Europe. If they had not succeeded as monarchs, the Habsburgs would have been the world’s greatest gossips and matchmakers.
But did anyone besides blood relatives and in-laws consider themselves Habsburgs? That was the problem. Though Emperor Franz Joseph (who reigned for sixty-eight years starting in 1848) saw himself as a universal force (like the Roman Catholic Church) and even adopted the motto Viribus unitis (with united forces), he never figured out how to create or instill the uni in his subjects. To most of them, he was just another Teuton, albeit one with thousands of cannons in his arsenal. While Franz Joseph was personally popular, the key term here is “personally.” His crown was not popular to those who considered themselves Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, etc. One scholar of the empire, Robert Kann, wrote that the Habsburg monarchy was “composed mainly of torsos of nations,” but not the heads or the hearts of the people.
It is hard to cheer for an omnipotent yet remote monarchy. For many the Habsburgs were an abstraction that did not share their faith, history, language, or family ties. How do you rally around a strange abstraction? It reminds me of comedian Robert Klein’s observation that his schools in New York did not have a name; they simply had numbers, like PS 406. He’d joke about the school fight song: “Dear 406, we love you!” And “80, your name will rise above . . . 79!” Hardly rah-rah crowd-pleasers.
The Habsburgs struggled with even less success than PS 406. They tried to grant some level of autonomy to various ethnic groups, and article 19 of Austria’s constitution ensured that schools would preserve ethnic languages. But what forces would fight entropy, the tendency for the people to break from the center? Without institutions that would celebrate a truly national consciousness, it was just a matter of time before the Habsburgs got swept into history’s dustbin.
When World War I broke out in 1914 following the assassination of Franz Joseph’s nephew in Serbia, the Habsburgs called upon their troops, who mostly showed up for battle. But they appeared to be fighting for their own homelands, not for the imagined uni nation based in Vienna. Battalions of Czech soldiers left Prague for the battlefield singing, “I’ve got to fight the Russians, but I don’t know why.” In southern Hungary, in Croatia, and along the Bosnian border, protesters and soldiers rebelled. They were shot, of course.
The Habsburgs lost the war and their crown. What’s left of a powerful empire that could not figure out how to create a shared language, shared traditions, and shared values? Just some fading photos of Emperor Franz Joseph displaying a fluffy mustache and muttonchops. Otto von Habsburg, the last surviving child of the last emperor, was born in the family palace in 1912. He died a few years ago at age ninety-nine, but not before seeing his son Karl host a television game show called Who Is Who? Indeed.
Unless today’s rich nations rediscover and embrace their national characters, they will break apart and the names of those countries will serve only to provide an answer in a trivia game that our great-grandchildren will play.