Je pense qu’il n’y a pas, dans le monde civilisé, de pays où l’on s’occupe moins de philosophie qu’aux États-Unis. [I think that there is no country in the civilized world where less attention is paid to philosophy than in the United States.]
—Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Tome II (1840)
TO THIS DAY, ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE’S OBSERVATION REMAINS true. Except in a few obscure corners of academia, Americans still do not trouble themselves about philosophy. But without stopping to philosophize, Americans were busy then, as now, exemplifying a philosophy of pragmatism. And that philosophy found its perfect expression in the two letters OK, coincidentally created almost at the same time Tocqueville’s treatise on democracy in America was published.
Consider this: OK is practical, not sentimental. It means that something works. It doesn’t imply or demand perfection, nor does it imply disappointment. It’s just … perfectly OK.
Even its form is just right: one word consisting of a mere two letters, almost as short as an expression can be. Best of all, it exemplifies imperfection successfully overcome, blatant misspelling not holding it back from becoming America’s most successful invention.
And that’s just the half of it. Thanks to the accident of the now-faded fad for transactional analysis, “I’m OK—you’re OK” has become the American philosophy of the new century. We really believe that “I’m OK—you’re OK” is the best way to treat ourselves and others. We want ourselves to be OK. We are concerned with building self-esteem and are concerned when someone doesn’t have it. Religion sometimes calls us sinners, even miserable sinners—but we have learned to get over it. I’m OK, thank you!
And as for you, you’re OK too. Not just OK, you’re AOK. Even, or especially, if you’re different from me.
Nowadays not only do we allow others to be different, we celebrate diversity. We have laws that require us to respect differences, and we have admonitions to rejoice in them. And we teach “I’m OK, you’re OK” to our children, for example in Todd Parr’s first Okay Book (1999): it’s OK to be short, it’s OK to wear what you want, it’s OK to come from a different place, it’s OK to be a different color. OK is not merely toleration but celebration.
In an arena quite different from psychology, a whole course can be built around the “I’m OK—you’re OK” theme. The World History Association, in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson Leadership Program for Teachers, features on its website an interdisciplinary course in world history and literature for high school students with the title “I’m Okay, You’re Okay: Teaching Tolerance Through World Religions.” The teachers of the course, Pat Carney and Anne Wallin, explain:
Religion is an important aspect of historical and literary studies. No universal agreement exists about religion. To encourage norms of acceptance and tolerance in classroom discussions, we examine the vocabulary of intolerance, such as ethnocentrism and xenophobia. We study various belief systems to learn about these and to understand others. Our purpose is not to proselytize. We recognize that there are many views.
Perhaps thinking along these lines, a majority of Americans in 2008 decided it was OK to elect a president with a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas.
So today we have two influential OKs: OK the embodiment of down-to-earth pragmatism and OK the voice of tolerance. Not bad for just two letters.
Forget the other American inventions: telegraph, telephone, typewriter, television, computer, smart phone, not to mention electric lighting, the hula hoop, variable-speed windshield wiper, and trick-or-treat. These merely influenced our lives; OK influences our thinking. It could be argued that OK is America’s greatest invention.
I confess to a fondness for OK—so mighty yet so humble. Unconventional, but mild-mannered. Too humble even to show itself in grand speeches and declarations. We ought to celebrate OK Day every year on its birthday, March 23.