“Towards Something American”

It is a commonplace, I know, to say we are a

"nation of immigrants." But that means far

more than that we are all descended from foreigners.

It also means that the very tenor and

nature of American life — its underlying resonance,

its deep currents — have been defined in

large part by the immigrant experience and, in

particular, by the immigrant's experience of dis-

placement and loss. You can find writ small, in

individual immigrant lives, the same tensions,

ambiguities of desire, contradictions, and

struggles that are writ large across almost all of

American life and in most American lives.

I am thinking, specifically, about what hap-

pens to the traditions and values that previously

gave order and meaning to immigrants' lives —

the crisis that occurs in terms of culture. It is

that crisis, I think, that is in an important sense

our own, enveloping and involving all Americans— even those of

us whose ancestors arrived here long ago.

Culture, after all, is more than the way immi-

grants (or, for that matter, the rest of us) do

things, dress, or eat. It is also more than art,

ritual, or language. It is, beyond all that, the

internalized and overarching beliefs and systems of

meaning that create community, dignify individual

lives, and make action significant. It pro-

vides a way not only of organizing the world but

also of realizing the full dimensions and dignity

of one's own existence and the moral relation it

bears to the full scheme of earthly and unearthly

things.

And it is all of that which is called into ques-

tion and threatened when immigrants leave one

place for another. To put it as simply as I can:

immigrants find themselves dislocated not only

in terms of space but also in terms of meaning,

time, and value, caught between a past no longer

fully accessible and a future not yet of use.

Inevitably, a sort of inner oscillation is set up, a

tension between the old world and the new.

The subsequent drama is in some ways more

profound, more decisive than the material

struggle to survive. It involves the immigrant

soul, if by soul one simply means the deepest

part of the self, the source of human connected-

ness and joy. The great tidal pulls of past and

future, of one world and another, create a third

and inner world, the condition of exile — one in

which the sense of separateness and loss, of

in-betweenness, of suspension and even orphan-

hood, become more of a home for the immi-

grant, more of a homeland, than either the

nation left behind or America newly entered.

Perhaps it is easiest to understand all this by

looking at the schisms that appear within immi-

grant and refugee families, the gaps that open up

between generations. The parents are for the

most part pulled backward toward the values of

the past, often struggling to create, in the new

world, simulacra of the cultures they left be-

hind. But the children are pulled forward into

the vortex of American life with its promise of

new sensations, pleasures, experiences, risks,

and material goods — most of which have more

to do with fashion than with values, and few of

which, in the end, can touch the soul, deepen

the self, or lead someone to wisdom.

You will note that I said American "life"

rather than American "culture." I want to make

that distinction clear. For I am not absolutely

sure that there really is an American culture —

not, at least, in the ordinary sense of the word

or in the torn of anything that might replace in

the heart or moral imagination what immigrant

parents left behind. What we like to think of as

the "melting pot" often seems more like a super-

heated furnace that must be fed continuously

with imported values and lives, whose destruction

creates the energy and heat of American

life. And as interesting as that life is, and as

liberating or addictive as it can become, in terms

of values, America remains even now much

what it was when the first Europeans arrived: a

raw open space, a wilderness, though today it is

a moral and spiritual wilderness rather than a

geographical one.

1 do not say that mournfully or deploringly. A

wilderness, after all, is not empty. It has its own

wonders and virtues. It is simply wild, untamed,

essentially unknowable and directionless: open

to all possibilities and also full of dangers. If you

think about it, what one is really talking about

here is freedom: the forms it takes in America,

and what it costs as well as confers upon us. The

ideas of wilderness and freedom have always

been intertwined in America. It was the moral

neutrality of the wilderness, the absence of pre-

existing institutions, of culture, if you will,

which conferred upon the settlers the freedom

they sought. Even while still on their ships, the

Puritans claimed to be in "a state of nature" and

therefore free of all sovereignty save their own.

And now, 300 years later, freedom in America

still means essentially being left alone: the chance

to pursue, undeterred by others, the dictates (or

absence) of appetite, will, faith, or conscience.

But that same idea of freedom, which is the

real hallmark of American life and perhaps its

greatest attraction, also causes immense difficulties

for us. For one thing, it intensifies the frag-

mentary nature of our society, undermining for

many Americans the sense of safety or order to

be found in more coherent cultures. For an-

other, it makes inevitable social complexity,

competition between values, and rapidity of

change, which often make the world seem

threatening or out of control, inimical to any

system of value.

Hence the nostalgia of so many Americans

for the past, a nostalgia which exists side by side

with perpetual change and amounts, in moral

terms, to a longing for "the old country." The

fact is that the values and traditions fed to the

furnace of American life never disappear al-

together — at least not quite. There remains

always, in every ethnic tradition, in the

generational legacy of every individual family, a

certain residue, a kind of ash, what 1 would call

"ghost-values": the tag ends and shreds and echoes

of the past calling to us generations after

their real force has been spent, tantalizing us

with idealized visions of a stability or order or

certainty of meaning that we seem never to

have known, and that we imagine can somehow

be restored.

You can detect the pull of these ghost-values

in our political debates about public issues such

as abortion, pornography, and "law and order,"

and in the vast swings in American mores be-

tween the adventurous and the conservative.

But equally significant and far more interesting

are the ways in which these schizoid tendencies

are at work in so many of us as individuals — as if

we ourselves were (and indeed we are) miniaturized Americas…

…The end result, of course, is that we end up

much the way our immigrant ancestors did:

without a world in which we feel at home. The

present itself seems continually to escape us.

The good and the true always lie behind us or

ahead. Always in transit, usually distracted, we

are rarely satisfied or sustained by the world as it

is, things as they are, or the facticity of the

given, to use a fancy but accurate phrase. We tend

to lack the deep joy or the gravid resignation

engendered in other cultures by a sense of ease in

time: the long shadow cast by lives lived for

generations in a loved mode or place. "Home" is for

us, as it is for all immigrants, something to be

regained, created, discovered, or mourned —

not where we are in time or space, but where we

dream of being.