The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
(Lifelong Learning – Hilton Head Island, SC – March 31, 2016)
The Burden of Being Born American
There is no explaining exactly why anyone is born to anyone anywhere. It is safest to say that it “just happens.” Some babies are born to wealthy parents in wealthy countries, some are born to poor parents in poor countries. Others are born in very stable nations or families, while still others make their earthly debut in very volatile states or families.
Where we are born and to what particular parents we are born has a major bearing on whom we become as adults. It does not solely determine our outcome, but it still is highly influential. A child born in East London or in the Gorbals in Glasgow is less likely to become the Prime Minister of the UK than a child born to parents who live in Knightsbridge, London or in a palatial country estate in Yorkshire. A baby born in a public housing project in Queens or Los Angeles is less likely to become the President of the USA than a child born on the Upper East Side in Manhattan or in Beverly Hills. A baby born to a father who is a billionaire industrialist in Mumbai shall probably be more successful in life than a baby born to a farmer who owns three acres of land who lives in a village in South India. And so it goes.
When we are born where we are born also influences what becomes of us. A boy born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1627 could never become the equivalent of a Steve Jobs in the late 20th century. A musically-inclined girl born in the mountains of southeastern Tennessee in 1834 could never become a Dolly Parton, even if she were Dolly’s great- or great-great-grandmother.
In several respects, every birth of anyone anywhere represents an accident of birth. That is, nobody, at least no earthly being, truly planned all the circumstances of that birth. Probably God didn’t plan it either. It just happened.
There are about three-hundred-and-twenty million Americans. Two-hundred-seventy-million of us were born here, give or take a few million. The rest, 12% or so, came here as immigrants.
From many standpoints, being born an American or being a naturalized American offers many opportunities most of the world’s people do not have. For all the deficiencies of our educational system, we nevertheless have better educational options for our young people than can be found in most other nations. We like to claim that we have the world’s best health system, which almost certainly is not true, but still, it is very good compared to the great majority of the world’s countries. Our standard of living is not Number One in the world, but it isn’t far behind. I suspect that a much larger percentage of Americans of all ages would say they would prefer to be Americans than would the citizens of any other nation prefer to be their own nationality. However, I admit that statement is totally impossible to validate, so don’t spend much time thinking about it. It just occurred to me as I was writing this lecture.
Millions of Americans strongly believe in what is called “American exceptionalism.” Certain members of one of our political parties seem unusually ideologically wedded to that notion. And in many ways America and Americans are positively exceptional. We have the strongest economy in the world, the strongest military, we are world leaders in technological innovation, and we are extraordinarily influential in many areas of international leadership.
However, there are downsides to our exceptionalism which are almost always overlooked. Our rich are richer with respect to the rest of us than are the rich of most other developed countries compared to their fellow citizens. American poor people are poorer compared to most other Americans than are the poor of most other countries compared to their fellow citizens.
We are exceptionally violent. Compared to most other developed states, more Americans take up arms against one another than do most Europeans or Asians or Australians. Every year police kill, on average, over a thousand people by means of firearms. Every year 30,000 other people kill one another with firearms. On a percentage basis, that is truly exceptional, and no other democracy in the world comes close to that level of gun-caused carnage. Guns do kill people, despite the efforts of the NRA to deny that self-evident truth.
We are exceptionally anti-abortion compared to most other people in other developed states. Since 1973, when abortion became legal throughout the nation, there have been eleven murders, 26 attempted murders, and more than 200 bombing attacks against clinics where abortions are performed and against the doctors who work in them. But abortions are a fraction of 1% of the services provided in those women’s-health-care clinics. And in any case, almost no other nationality exhibits such virulent opposition to abortion as do Americans. Many American evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, and others are extraordinarily stirred up regarding the practice of abortion compared to people in every other country in the world.
A 2014 poll of 382 local and national police departments revealed that among the top three terrorist threats, 74% of the respondents included anti-government extremism, while only 39% cited Islamist extremism. Americans seem more likely than the citizens of other western nations to engage in anti-government violence. Our various levels of government are confronted by anti-government extremism more than most of the governments in most other liberal democracies. The very institution of government is anathema to many citizens worldwide, but violent anti-government sentiment seems to be stronger in the USA than in most other nations.
There is an undeniable burden, as well as a blessing, in being born American. But to understand how and why that that burden exists, let us consider how, in prior times, it was a particular burden to be born a citizen of other nations. In so doing, we may better comprehend why it is a burden to be born American at the present time. Whoever has the misfortune to be born in any country that is a world power at any given period of history is going to pay personally for their accident of birth in one way or another. Let us examine how that came to pass in centuries gone by.
The British Empire lasted as a major center of world power for well over two centuries. The first serious loss of power it experienced was the American Revolution. Had the British monarchy been more enlightened in how to deal with restive colonials, there would have been no war. King George and the majority of the Members of the British Parliament incorrectly assumed that raw military and political pressure would quell American complaints. It didn’t.
However, despite losing the thirteen American colonies, the British remained the primary world power from the early 18th century through the early 20th century. It has been claimed by historians that Great Britain attacked or invaded all but twenty-two of the nation-states then in existence during the British Empire. Those were the years in which it was rightly declared that “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” To the east of Great Britain the Union Jack flew in New Zealand, Australia, parts of China, India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine, Malta, Gibraltar, South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, and other parts of Africa. To the west, Ireland, Canada, several island groups in the Caribbean, British Honduras, and British Guiana were included in the Empire. It was in those days that Victorian Britons sang with pride, “The Navy, the British Navy, it’s the light of the world today.” For much of that era Great Britain itself had a population of only ten to twenty-five million people. It was an extraordinary achievement.
Nevertheless, all was not well in the Land of Hope and Glory. The British Army and Navy were called on to put out brushfires of unrest all over the Empire for its entire existence. That took manpower, money, and munitions. By the time of the Boer War in South Africa, Britain was being stretched to the limit. World War I signaled the beginning of the end of the British Empire, although the chap who was Prime Minister in World War II thought the Empire was still a valid political and military entity until he drew his last breath in 1965. It wasn’t.
What was it like to be a Briton at the height of the Empire, say in the mid- to late-19th century? It was like being an American in the mid- to late-20th century. It felt wonderful. The British were the envy of the world. They were rich. Their culture was in full flower. Gilbert and Sullivan both extolled and mocked that culture in their timeless operettas. British government officials and business people were everywhere around the globe. The British people, from the monarch to the poorest person in the land, felt special and unique compared to all other peoples everywhere in the world.
But there were also undeniable disadvantages. Some of the brightest and most able young British males lost their lives in the many wars Britain felt it was obligated to wage. In particular, a few million British subjects in World Wars I and II, military and civilians, were killed specifically because they were British. Had they been born in Iran, Albania, or Bolivia, they would not have died. As Winston Churchill himself observed, half the members of the graduating classes of 1914 through 1917 from Oxford and Cambridge were killed within days or months of their first entering into combat in the trenches of France or on the high seas. No country can long afford to lose its most gifted young people in wars which ultimately solve nothing and leave only wreckage and turmoil behind.
The British Empire was an economic colossus until World War I. That war and World War II sapped its strength, and Britain has never recovered. It is now a second-tier economic and military power, and it is unlikely to re-emerge as a true world power for the foreseeable future.
Other nations have suffered the same fate. Spain was the world power in the 15th and 16th centuries, France was the world dominator for a time after that, and then a century later under Napoleon. Then along came Britain. In the early 20th century, Imperial Germany attempted to assume a position as the leading nation of the world, but its defeat in World War I snuffed out that possibility. By the end of the 1930s Nazi Germany was the world juggernaut, along with its ally Imperial Japan. World War II extinguished their short-lived day in the sun.
For a period of five to ten years, from 1945 to 1955, the USA was the undisputed cosmic colossus. Then along came the USSR to challenge America.
The sober and sobering truth is that the USSR was never a world economic power. Its ideological commitment to communism prevented that from ever happening. A Marxist economy could never be the leading world economy. Utopian socialism could never gain world domination, and theoretical Marxism was essentially utopian, although Soviet communism was anything but utopian. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union did become one of the two world military super-powers, and it continued in that capacity from the mid-1950s to 1991, when it collapsed from internal weaknesses and from spending too much of its national GDP on the Cold War.
China was a second- or even third-tier economic power in the world up until the 1990s. Then, seemingly unrecognized to anyone other than serious China-watchers, it appeared to move into position to challenge the United States as the world power. The jury is still out on whether China shall succeed in that challenge, but a decision could come in the next few decades. If the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party as presently constituted continues in power, its ascendancy will be in serious doubt. In any event, considering the age of those who are listening to this lecture, and the relatively advanced age of the lecturer, the United States shall continue as the world economic colossus for as long as any of us shall continue to draw breath. Of that there should be no serious doubt.
Being born Spanish, French, British, German, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, or American at particular periods over the past five centuries has no doubt been a blessing, but it also was a mixed blessing. Soldiers living in Nepal, Iran, Hungary, Tanzania, Upper Volta, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico were never sent to fight wars thousands of miles from their homeland, nor were their countries expected to send aid to anyone beyond their borders. But the citizens of world powers are regularly commandeered to wage foreign wars and to provide aid to nations far from their borders. To whom much is given much is expected. It goes with the territory, and it cannot be avoided. The only way for big, powerful countries to avert doing big important things for other countries is for them to lose some of their power. Eventually that always happens to every world power, but almost never by choice or chance. Many different kinds of circumstances coalesce to diminish great powers. It has always been thus and it always shall be thus. Paul Kennedy’s outstanding book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, chronicles the inexorable up-and-down process for several imperial nations throughout world history.
But why is being born American anytime in the past century a burden? It is because others require, request, or demand so much of us. It is because if we do not provide the leadership which great powers are always expected to offer, other nations and we ourselves will begin to believe that we have fallen from our lofty height as the Sole Surviving Superpower, and that we definitely do not want to do. What nation-state would ever willingly plummet from its perch as First-Among-Equals? It is unthinkable!
But of course it will happen regardless of what the US does or does not do in the near- to mid-future. No nation can stay on top forever. It is not possible. History, geography, economics, and politics invariably and dispassionately conspire to bring down the Number Ones. Such plummets are inevitable.
In a positive sense, the United States of America has had a remarkably good run. We led in bringing the world back from a near-universal-collapse after the Second World War. The Marshall Plan, billions of dollars in both economic and military foreign aid, alliances which prevented wars, successful wars waged with those allies, development assistance to third-world nations, our participation in the United Nations (checkered as it has been): the US has taken many laudable steps as a great power. And we shall take many more in the future.
In a negative sense, our national stewardship has been highly suspect at certain times and in certain circumstances. From the first moment white European immigrants to the New World set foot on American soil, they began a long and bloody process of wresting that land from its original settlers. Unintentionally we killed countless native people with our diseases, but ruthlessly we deliberately killed countless others with our superior weapons. We moved Indians long distances to accommodate us, “we” being white folks, and we placed many of them onto reservations where they were forced to remain against their will. It was Darwinism in action; the fittest survived, while the militarily less fit devolved almost into ethnic oblivion.
Until humane laws were passed by more enlightened politicians, we allowed children to be cooped up in dark satanic mills, and the poorest Americans lived in absolute squalor. The powerful ordinarily exercise their authority against the powerless, and it happened with depressing regularity for much of our history into the 20th century.
Over the past century our military has killed millions of people. It shall be retorted, “But so have the British and the Germans and Japanese and Soviets and Chinese!” This, of course, is sadly also true. But they and we did it because all of us were world powers at one time or another, and world powers seem to be unable to avoid killing millions of people. It is what they do. How can you be a world power and not use your power to quell enemies?
The US is the only nation ever to engage in all-out nuclear war. We should feel an immense burden because of that, despite the fact that it undoubtedly brought the war in the Pacific to an astonishingly swift close. Furthermore, undoubtedly far fewer Japanese, Americans, and others were killed because those weapons were detonated than if they had not been used, and instead a military invasion of the Japanese islands had occurred. Nevertheless, in August of 1945 the USA possessed a total of two nuclear weapons, and we deployed both of them, the first on Hiroshima, the second on Nagasaki. In the 1940s, only a great power would or could seek to develop atomic bombs. In the second decade of the 21st century, second- or third-tier states might try to build or buy nuclear bombs, but in the 1940s, only the great powers or the former great powers sought such weapons. The fact that the US got them first, and used them, is a burden every one of us should feel. And if we don’t feel it, that in itself is a tragically unrecognized burden, and thus perhaps even a heavier one.
The CIA or other US government organizations have driven out or assassinated leaders of democracies or dictatorships. Our actions on the battlefield have resulted in millions of people becoming refugees. We have involved ourselves in wars in which the enemies we created were not our enemies at all, but we ended up turning them into foes anyway. Well over half the refugees in the world who are fleeing from their homelands for safer refuges are doing so because of actions the American government through its military has taken, either directly or indirectly.
The Muslim world is in very dangerous turbulence because of policies set in place by the US government fifty or seventy-five or a hundred years ago. The hatred of many Muslims toward the United States did not begin with the wars in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, or Iraq. It began with the administrations of both Roosevelt Presidents, and Presidents Wilson, Truman, and Eisenhower. In 1953 the CIA engineered the overthrow of the first and only democratically elected leader in the entire history of Iran. Iran is a Shiite Muslim nation. The last kind of Muslims we should ever want to stir up are Shiites, and we have been paying a terrible price for that disastrous meddling ever since.
World powers cannot avoid enraging some of the citizens or subjects of national powers which are likely third-rate as the world reckons power. It has not been possible for the US not to irritate or aggravate or infuriate many people in third-world nations while we have been one of the leaders if not the leader of the first-world. If we imagine that we have been more moral or caring or wise in our conduct of foreign affairs than previous world powers, we delude ourselves. No one with very powerful hands can have entirely clean hands. Power corrupts, and great power corrupts greatly.
It is a burden to have been born American in the 20th or 21st centuries, just as it was a burden to have been Spanish in the 15th or 16th centuries, British or French in the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries, German, Japanese, or Russian in the 20th century, or Chinese in the 20th or 21st centuries. All the people who live in every great power in history have blood on their hands, whether they realize it or not or admit it or not.
Are Americans uniquely oblivious to the moral maladies our exceptional power have created, or are we on a par with every other national people of every other imperial at every other period of history? Exceptional power breeds moral blindness; there is no way around it. And whether we are better or worse than the people of previous great powers is beside the point. Exceptional power breeds exceptional failures as well as exceptional successes.
We are too much impressed by our muscle in the world and too little aware of our mistakes. Such is the inevitable outcome of living in any great nation when it is at the height of its national economic and military strength.
I am reminded of the best-known British writer and poet who lived throughout the peak of British imperial power. He represented some of the best of British literature, and he chronicled some of the worst of British imperial excesses. To read his poems Danny Deever, Tommy, Gunga Din, and The Ballad of East and West is to observe at once the understandably superior sentiments and the gnawing ethical uncertainties of a complicated and gifted man. His name was Rudyard Kipling.
I want to read in its entirety Kipling’s poem called simply Recessional. It was first publicized on June 22, 1897, when the British Empire was its zenith. It also happened to be almost exactly in the middle of the four-year Boer War. The poem’s title is thus sardonically ironic. Recessional is fundamentally a prayer to God for a nation at the peak of its power.
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies,
The Captains and the Kings depart,
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire;
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word –
Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!
When I was in seventh or eighth grade, the East Junior High School Chorus of Madison, Wisconsin sang a musical arrangement of Recessional. My fuzzy memory perhaps recalls that we sang it for the other students in the assembly hall, although we may have sung it only to ourselves; I can’t really remember. At the time, I happily sang it, because I liked to sing, even though I did not consciously absorb much of the piercing and probing content of those lyrics. In retrospect that experience may have been an early factor in eventually turning me into an internationalist much more than a nationalist. Having grown up in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1950s no doubt was another major impetus in my personal evolution. The year 2016 in Wisconsin is, I suspect, may turn out to be quite another story.
I want to postulate an hypothesis for you. Briefly stated, it is this: the type of American voters who have become so enthusiastic for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders realize in their innards, as do few of the rest of us either in our innards or in our heads, that being Americans has not served them well, compared to other Americans. They feel that a great power has somehow let them down. They respond to two very different candidates for the American presidency in two very different ways, but their sense of malaise is strikingly similar. They somehow feel that America has started to decline, and before it collapses into the status of an also-ran, they want a larger piece of the American pie, while there is still some pie left to get a larger piece of. Or pie of which to get a larger piece, if that is your grammatical preference. The election of 2016 may be a preview of things to come, many of which may not be pretty.
Wise statesmen and politicians can mitigate the burden of being born in a world power, but they cannot eliminate it. For the next several decades, anyone who shall be born in America or who shall become a naturalized American citizen shall see American power and influence slowly seep away. Being a citizen in such a situation results in the burden of having to watch it happen. Whether we deal with it gracefully or disgracefully is up to us.
The OLD Philosopher, John M. Miller, is a still-active clergyman who has been preaching for over fifty years. He lives on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
Copyrighted by John M. Miller