By coming to America, I have seen my life break free of these traditional confines. I came to Arizona as an exchange student, but a year later I was enrolled at Dartmouth College. There I fell in with a group of students who were actively involved in politics; soon I had switched my major from economics to English literature. My reading included books like Plutarch’s Moralia; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay’s Federalist Papers; and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. They transported me to places a long way from home and implanted in my mind ideas that I had never previously considered. By the time I graduated, I decided that I should become a writer, which is something you can do in this country. America permits many strange careers: this is a place where you can become, say, a comedian. I would not like to go to my father and tell him that I was thinking of becoming a comedian. I do not think he would have found it funny.
Soon after graduation I became the managing editor of a policy magazine and began to write freelance articles in the Washington Post. Someone in the Reagan White House was apparently impressed by my work, because I was called in for an interview and promptly hired as a senior domestic policy analyst. I found it strange to be working at the White House, because at the time I was not a United States citizen. I am sure that such a thing would not happen in India or anywhere else in the world. But Reagan and his people didn’t seem to mind; for them, ideology counted more than nationality. I also met my future wife in the Reagan administration, where she was at the time a White House intern. (She has since deleted it from her résumé.) My wife was born in Louisiana and grew up in San Diego; her ancestry is English, French, Scotch-Irish, German, and American Indian.
I notice that Americans marry in a rather peculiar way: by falling in love. You may think that I am being ironic, or putting you on, so let me hasten to inform you that in many parts of the world, romantic love is considered a mild form of insanity. Consider a typical situation: Anjali is in love with Arjun. She considers Arjun the best-looking man in the world, the most intelligent, virtually without fault, a paragon of humanity! But everybody else can see that Arjun is none of these things. What, then, persuades Anjali that Arjun possesses qualities that are nowhere in evidence? There is only one explanation: Anjali is deeply deluded. It does not follow that her romantic impulses should be ruthlessly crushed. But, in the view of many people and many traditions around the world, they should be steered and directed and prevented from ruining Anjali’s life. This is the job of parents and the community, to help Anjali see beyond her delusions and to make decisions that are based on practical considerations and common sense.
If there is a single phrase that encapsulates life in the Third World, it is that “birth is destiny.” I remember an incident years ago when my grandfather called in my brother, my sister, and me, and asked us if we knew how lucky we were. We asked him why he felt this way: was it because we were intelligent, or had lots of friends, or were blessed with a loving family? Each time he shook his head and said, “No.” Finally we pressed him: why did he consider us so lucky? Then he revealed the answer: “Because you are Brahmins!”
The Brahmin, who is the highest ranking in the Hindu caste system, is traditionally a member of the priestly class. As a matter of fact, my family had nothing to do with the priesthood. Nor are we Hindu: my ancestors converted to Christianity many generations ago. Even so, my grandfather’s point was that before we converted, hundreds of years ago, our family used to be Brahmins. How he knew this remains a mystery. But he was serious in his insistence that nothing that the three of us achieved in life could possibly mean more than the fact that we were Brahmins.
This may seem like an extreme example, revealing my grandfather to be a very narrow fellow indeed, but the broader point is that traditional cultures attach a great deal of importance to data such as what tribe you come from, whether you are male or female, and whether you are the eldest son. Your destiny and your happiness hinge on these things. If you are a Bengali, you can count on other Bengalis to help you, and on others to discriminate against you; if you are female, then certain forms of society and several professions are closed to you; and if you are the eldest son, you inherit the family house and your siblings are expected to follow your direction. What this means is that once your tribe, caste, sex, and family position have been established at birth, your life takes a course that is largely determined for you.
In America, by contrast, you get to write the script of your own life. When your parents say to you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the question is open-ended; it is you who supply the answer. Your parents can advise you: “Have you considered law school?” “Why not become the first doctor in the family?” It is considered very improper, however, for them to try and force your decision. Indeed, American parents typically send their teenage children away to college, where they live on their own and learn independence. This is part of the process of forming your mind and choosing a field of interest for yourself and developing your identity. It is not uncommon in the United States for two brothers who come from the same gene pool and were raised in similar circumstances to do quite different things: the eldest becomes a gas station attendant, the younger moves up to be vice president at Oracle; the eldest marries his high-school sweetheart and raises four kids, the youngest refuses to settle down, or comes out of the closet as a homosexual; one is the Methodist that he was raised to be, the other becomes a Christian Scientist or a Buddhist. What to be, where to live, whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice—these are all decisions that Americans make for themselves.
In most parts of the world your identity and your fate are to a large extent handed to you; in America, you determine them for yourself. In America your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper, and you are the artist. This notion of you being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America. Young people especially find irresistible the prospect of being in the driver’s seat, of authoring the narrative of their own lives. So too the immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.
The phrase that captures this unique aspect of America is the “pursuit of happiness.” Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul analyzes the concept in this way: “It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”8
But where did the “pursuit of happiness” come from? How did America develop a unique framework for enabling people to shape their own destiny? I have been speaking autobiographically, so let me put the question in a more general way. Consider New York City. It is a tumultuous place, teeming with diversity: Wall Street hustlers, struggling artists, Pakistani cabdrivers, female book editors, philosophically-minded barbers, elderly women walking dogs, “Big Tony” with the hairy armpits serving pizza, and eccentrics of every stripe. New York has black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and native. I notice two striking things about these people. They are energetic, hardworking, opportunistic: they want to succeed, and believe there is a good chance they can. Second, for all their profound differences, they all manage somehow to get along. This raises a question about New York, and about America: how does it manage to reconcile such fantastic ethnic and religious and socioeconomic diversity and give hope and inspiration to so many people from all over the world?
I intend to answer this question, but first I want to mention a darker side of New York and America that has not escaped the attention of their critics. To the Islamic fundamentalist, the most striking aspect about New Y
ork is not its wealth or its diversity but its debauchery. From the point of view of many Muslims, and of some American conservatives too, New York City is Sin City. There debauchery not only seems prevalent, but even worse, it seems socially accepted.
This raises Sayyid Qutb’s argument that America may be a peaceful and a prosperous society but it is fundamentally an immoral society. Qutb would not be impressed by New York’s great productivity or its varied cuisine or the fact that people of different backgrounds get along together. He would dismiss all that as worthless triviality. He makes his argument on the highest level. In the good society, he contends, it is God, and not man, who rules. God is the source of all authority, including legitimate political authority. Virtue, not freedom, is the highest value. Therefore God’s commands, not man’s laws, should govern the society. The goal of the regime is to make people better, not to make them better off.
Qutb’s theocratic argument falls harshly on American ears, but let us recall that it is substantially the argument made by Plato and the classical philosophers, who argued that the best regime is devoted to inculcating virtue. Plato’s argument is that the ideal arrangement for a society is to have the wise people as rulers. No one can be against this, especially in view of the alternative, which is rule of the stupid or unwise. In Plato’s view, the wisest people are necessarily a small minority; in particular, they are the philosophers. Plato’s argument against democracy is that it mistakes quantity for quality: it prefers the choices of the uninformed multitude to those who really know what they are doing. In Plato’s view, democracy is the rule of unwise people by unwise people.
In theory, we have to concede that Plato and Qutb are right. Every society should seek to be ruled by its best people, and, to take the point further, who would make a better and more just ruler than an omniscient God? Moreover, it would be silly to insist that God issue a set of laws or rules; better to let Him use divine discretion and decide each case on its merits. Nor is there any question of God submitting to election or popular referendum: why should divine wisdom, which is infallible, be subject to the consent of the unwise?
But let us not be hasty in trying to implement these schemes. Even as we concede, in principle, the validity of the doctrine articulated in Plato’s Republic, it cannot escape our notice that he has not given us a portrait of an actual city. Rather, his is a “city in speech,” a utopia; even Plato does not expect to see it realized. There are, of course, Islamic theocracies. The Taliban had one in Afghanistan, and several other Muslim countries, notably Iran, operate on the premise that they are being ruled by Allah’s decrees. But far from being replicas of paradise on earth, these places seem to be characterized by widespread misery, discontent, tyranny, and inequality. Is God, then, such an incompetent ruler?
In reality, Iran is not ruled by God; it is ruled by politicians and mullahs who claim to act on God’s behalf. Right away we see the two problems with Qutb’s doctrine. First, Allah’s teaching must be divined or interpreted by man, and this raises the question of whether the revelation is authentic and the interpretation accurate. Second, people inevitably disagree over what Allah is saying, or about how his edict applies in a given situation, so inevitably there must be some human means of adjudicating the conflict. In some cases people may even reject Allah himself, preferring the wisdom of the Christian God or that of their own minds. What is to be done with them?
Islam has solutions to these problems, and they are stern ones. Through an elaborate system of Koranic law, precedent, and tradition, Islamic societies seek to apply divine wisdom to a multitude of situations. Since no law, however detailed, can anticipate every human circumstance, in practice this approach places divine authority at the discretion of mullahs and other authorities, who can use it to have people fined, jailed, flogged, dismembered, or killed. Such sentences are quite common in Islamic societies. As for dissenters and nonbelievers, Islamic societies have traditionally dealt with them with predictable severity. Islamic rulers required Christians and Jews to pay a special tax and to agree to a whole set of religious and social restrictions (no proselytizing, no bearing arms, restrictions on intermarriage, bans on taking certain government posts, no testifying against a Muslim in court, and so on) that effectively made them second-class citizens. As for atheists, polytheists, and apostates, Islamic rulers gave them a simple choice: accept Allah or be killed.9
Before we wax too indignant about Islam’s intolerance, let us remember that Christianity traditionally was even more intolerant. Medieval Christians generally had no compunction about expelling Jews, burning heretics, and obtaining confessions with the sword. Muslim rulers may have forced Christians and Jews to be second-class citizens, but some Christian rulers refused to permit Muslims and Jews to be citizens at all. And when Christianity split into Catholic and Protestant, the two camps set upon each other with a sanguinary vengeance. The American founders were all too familiar with the history of the religious wars, which wreaked havoc and destruction in Europe, and they were determined to avoid that bloodshed here.
The founders who confronted the problem of religion were themselves religious men—not orthodox Christians, but Deists—who would have agreed with Qutb that political legitimacy derives from God. I realize that this view runs counter to what many Americans are taught: that America’s system of government emerged in resistance to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Yet the Declaration of Independence clearly states that the source of our rights is “our Creator.” It is because our rights come from God, and not from ourselves, that they are “unalienable.” Thus we see that America, too, was founded on divine right: the only difference is that sovereignty is transferred from the one (the king) to the many (the people).
Despite the religious foundation for the American system of government, the founders were determined not to permit theological differences to become the basis for political conflict. The solution they came up with was as simple as it was unique: separation of religion and government. This is not the same thing as religious tolerance. Think about what tolerance means. If I tolerate you, that implies I believe you are wrong, I object to your views, but I will put up with you. (If I found your views congenial, there would be no question of tolerance.) In line with this thinking, England had enacted a series of acts of religious toleration. But England also had an official church. The American system went beyond toleration in refusing to establish a national church and in recognizing that all citizens were free to practice their religion.
One reason that separation of religion and government worked is that from the beginning the United States was made up of numerous, mostly Protestant, sects. The Puritans dominated in Massachusetts, the Anglicans in Virginia, the Catholics were concentrated in Maryland, and so on. No group was strong enough to subdue all the others, and so it was in every group’s interest to “live and let live.” The ingenuity of the American solution is evident in Voltaire’s remark that where there is one religion, you have tyranny; where there are two, you have religious war; but where there are many, you have freedom.10
A second reason the American founders were able to avoid religious oppression and conflict is that they found a way to channel people’s energies away from theological quarrels and into commercial activity. The American system is founded on property rights and trade, and The Federalist tells us that the protection of the unequal faculties of obtaining property is “the first object of government.”11 The logic of this position is best expressed by Samuel Johnson’s remark, “There are few ways in which a man is so innocently occupied than in getting money.”12 The founders reasoned that people who are working assiduously to better their condition, people who are planning to make an addition to their kitchen, and who are saving up for a vacation, are not likely to go around spearing their neighbors.
Capitalism gives America a this-worldly focus, in which death and the afterlife recede from everyday view. (This is why funerals are an uncommon and distressing sight in America.) The gaze of the peo
ple is shifted from heavenly aspirations to earthly progress. This “lowering of the sights” convinces many critics that American capitalism is a base, degraded system and the energies that drive it are crass and immoral. These modern critiques draw on some very old prejudices. In the ancient world, labor was generally despised and in some cases even ambition was seen as reprehensible. Think about the lines from Julius Caesar, “The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious.” And here you might expect Mark Antony to say, “And what’s wrong with that?” But he goes on, “If it were so, it was a grievous fault.”13
In all the cultures of antiquity, Western as well as non-Western, the merchant and the trader were viewed as lowlife scum. The Greeks looked down on their merchants, and the Spartans tried to stamp out the profession altogether. “The gentleman understands what is noble,” Confucius writes in his Analects. “The small man understands what is profitable.”14 In the Indian caste system the vaisya or trader occupies nearly the lowest rung of the ladder—one step up from the despised untouchable. The Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun suggests that even gain by conquest is preferable to gain by trade, because conquest embodies the virtues of courage and manliness.15 In these traditions, the honorable life is devoted to philosophy or the priesthood or military valor. “Making a living” was considered a necessary, but undignified, pursuit. As Ibn Khaldun would have it, far better to rout your adversary, kill the men, enslave the women and children, and make off with a bunch of loot than to improve your lot by buying and selling stuff.
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