The recent flap over Confederate flags reminds us of the continuing importance of the “merely” symbolic. While pennants, banners and flags have a long European tradition as symbols that many would die for, in today’s world Americans seem uniquely attached to them. My landlady in North Cambridge, Mass. – the “North” is significant – used to hang the American flag in front of her house every summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day, while her son displayed a sticker on his pick-up truck reading “The American flag – fly it, don’t fry it.” This was evidently a reference to the long-haired leftists at the other end of town who expressed their opposition to the Vietnam war by burning the Stars and Stripes.
Actually, I find such attention to symbolism to be one of the more admirable qualities of the American. For though I am an American by birth and citizenship, I often find myself looking at my country from a distance. Call it an out-of-nation experience. Moreover, I sometimes wonder how prospective Ukrainian immigrants had imagined America, how it looked to them when they arrived, what it was really like then, and what it has become today. These are, of course, four different things.
For post-war immigrants like my parents – as for many today – there was simply nowhere else to go. The U.S. promised not only economic opportunity, but – importantly for political refugees – freedom and legality. Moreover, Americans were likeable people – friendly, generous, honest, hard-working and optimistic – though sometimes astoundingly naive. Of course, there were exceptions. Some New Englanders shunned newcomers – those arrived since the Mayflower.
It had been different for my great-uncle, who arrived in 1906 at the age of 17. Looking for work in New York City, he soon ran out of money and food. As he recounted many years later, he considered suicide. I thought he was exaggerating. But recently, perusing newspapers from those years, I discovered that suicide was fairly common among the destitute. After all, this was before welfare and unemployment insurance. My great-uncle recited this aphorism in his Galician country dialect: “Ameryka zlotyi krai, ne mash hroshi – to zdykhai” (America is a golden land: if you don’t have money, you can drop dead). He became a baker; bakers always have bread.
America has mellowed since then. But the law of the marketplace still prevails over my parents’ Old World ethics. Even this Connecticut Yankee finds the pervasive commercialism annoying. Someone is always trying to sell you something. If the English, to Napoleon, were a nation of shopkeepers, the Americans are a nation of salesmen. Suspicion of commercial motives can vitiate friendship. Commerce, it seems, has subsumed everything: education, culture, the professions, the churches. My grandfather joked that the American national costume is the business suit. “The chief business of the American people is business,” said Calvin Coolidge in 1925 – though he also pointed out that wealth should be a means, not an end. As Europeans have long observed, commerce has shaped American manners: vulgar, aggressive, loud. And in our time, as our moral sense has begun to atrophy, our pragmatism has degenerated into a mindless materialism, while our spirit of adventure has descended to a despicable appetite for violence.
It’s silly, however, to condemn American capitalism. Its innumerable benefits are evident in our everyday lives, starting with the computer on which I am writing this article. It has put America in the forefront of scientific and technological innovation, and it has brought material well-being to millions.
Yet some maintain that global capitalism has kept other millions in poverty, while eroding culture and religion. And in its current form it entails enormous waste of natural resources. Some of this stems from Americans’ exaggerated individualism: try to wean us away from the gasoline-powered automobile, a particularly energy-inefficient mode of transportation. And is it the historical memory of the Holodomor, or just my family’s European notions of thrift, that sparks outrage when I see Americans throwing away food? This is also an ecological issue: unless we move from our throw-away economy to a circular one, in which we account for every natural resource that we use, we will remain complicit in the devastation of the environment and the resultant human poverty and suffering.
The usual American response to such arguments is an appeal to individual freedom. But freedom is of necessity limited; otherwise, it contradicts itself. If you “do whatever you want,” you may prevent your neighbor (wherever on the globe he may live) from doing what he must in order to survive. It is a false freedom that feeds off the servitude of others. In other words, you cannot separate freedom from responsibility.
Speaking of responsibility, is America responsible for Ukraine? Many have doubts. “Realists” and some conservatives argue that this is not a core American concern. Others advance the opposite argument: America is all too interested in Ukraine, which it will exploit for profit while continuing its geopolitical expansion. This puts our U.S. diaspora in an awkward position, since we cannot shake the suspicion that we are really pushing American, and not Ukrainian, interests. Neither position allows for the possibility that Americans can be motivated by ethical concerns. In this view, our European interventions in two world wars, our struggles against Nazism and Communism, and for that matter our unwavering support of an embattled Israel, were just matters of self-interest.
Perhaps. But today, when the world faces an irresponsible regime engaged in deadly unprovoked attacks on a neighboring people, can America really avoid a moral judgment? Where is the old Protestant ethic which, however flawed or inconsistent, motivated Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt? “The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness,” runs the motto of the State of Hawaii. Maybe we should federalize this dictum. The real U.S. “interest” in Ukraine is not about power or money. It is about right and wrong. On this, true patriots do not waver.