Americans are a great people, but do they have the vision to lead the world? asks Drew Forrest
“The tempest bursting from the waste of time
On the world’s fairest hope linked to man’s foulest crime”
The lines, by American writer Herman Melville, capture the complex nature of the United States far more accurately than some of the crude anti-US rhetoric sparked by the terror attacks two weeks ago.
It is not the Great Satan of radical Islamic demonology. It is the most brilliantly creative and energetic civilisation the world has produced, and its effect on every human being including the world’s Muslims has been profound.
Anyone who has driven a motor car, flown in a jetliner, used a telephone or electric lamp, watched a film or listened to a compact disc owes a debt of gratitude to the US, because Americans either invented the device, played a critical role in developing it or mass-produced it for the first time.
America’s impact on popular culture has been immeasurable, in part because of its unique multi- ethnic chemistry. Its music, rooted in African and British folk traditions, is the nearest thing there is to a global idiom.
The enormous productive power of modern industry is America’s prime gift to the world. It has been the difference between the politico-economic entropy of Europe in the 1920s and the socially integrated Europe of today. Its markets, which consume 40% of the world’s resources, have been central to the great forward leaps of Japan, the Pacific Rim and, most recently, India.
Underlying its strength and resourcefulness is a Promethean vision of individual human beings as equal to any challenge, unfettered by the past and unafraid of the future. Despite the size of its underclass and the power of its private corporations, it remains a society that encourages individuals to invent themselves.
Much the same applies to America’s popular democracy. Sceptical foreigners point to the empty glitz of presidential elections, where campaign funding and marketing techniques seem paramount, and the absence of a meaningful multiparty system.
But most Americans feel they own their government, and identify passionately with the flag, the anthem and the presidency, as supra-political symbols of nationhood. Significantly, there has never been a revolutionary threat to the US state.
The underlying unity of Americans of all classes, inexplicable to Marxists, flows from the deep-rooted Puritan ideas of self-reliance, self-improvement and the equality of believers.
But there is another, darker legacy of the founding fathers that does much to explain America’s troubled relationship with the outside world.
It is the idea that the world is divided between God’s chosen and the spiritually lost, and that material success is a mark of God’s favour. As in South Africa, Puritanism was the ideological underpinning of the destruction of indigenous peoples.
It was an idea given eloquent expression after the Washington and New York atrocities, when one US politician declared “we were attacked because we are good”.
Most Americans seem genuinely bewildered by the events of September 11. They can only explain such suicidal depths of hatred by recourse to a theory of crazed and wicked individuals, drawn to snuff out the light.
The theme of countless comic books and movies, the opposition between super-heroes and super- villains is deeply engrained in the American soul. It is an archetype that has surfaced in the tunnel- vision focus on Osama bin Laden.
Judging by video-taped interviews, Bin Laden is a heartless ideologue in the Pol Pot mould who applauds and considers American civilians legitimate targets. He appears to have provided military training and may have funded terrorism.
But not a shred of evidence has linked him to this particular outrage. His physical circumstances raise troubling doubts about the theory that he masterminded the attacks. Based in the wilds of Afghanistan, half the globe away from New York, he communicates face to face only. His vast wealth would have been irrelevant to a low-rent operation requiring pilots’ lessons, air fares and a few Stanley knives.
A sick man with a kidney complaint who walks with a stick, Bin Laden may in fact have inflated his own role in the loose-knit international terror campaign against the US.
Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusuf Zai, who has interviewed him and knows Afghan politics better than almost anyone else, believes he is driven by the desire to go down in history as an Islamic hero.
The complexities of Afghan politics and society also seem to be lost on the US. It is assumed that the Taliban’s refusal to surrender Bin Laden is rooted in terrorist sympathies.
Rahimullah argues that Taliban leaders have twice tried to prevail on him to leave, but feel reluctantly bound by his role in the Afghan war against the Soviets, and Islamic but more specifically Afghan customs of hospitality.
Nineteenth century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans lack a sense of tragedy. Their optimism and confidence is a key source of their strength. But they have little insight into the flawed nature of all human beings and human projects, and particularly of their own moral deficiencies.
If they had, they might see the glaring hiatus between their democratic professions and their support for tyrants and “torture states” over many years.
They might see that their anti- terrorism stance seems hollow to many, given past US support for terrorism in Angola, Nicaragua and El Salvador. They might be more alive to the outrage felt by all Muslims over Israel’s systematic abuses in the occupied territories, and perceptions that the US is indulging the Israelis.
Americans are a great people, and their economic power, vitality and libertarian traditions have a potentially huge role in making the world a better place to live in.
But large questions have been raised by the US government’s approach to the Cold War and response to terrorism. Does it have the spiritual and moral vision to provide the right kind of world leadership?