The Promise and Peril of America
By: The Good Men Project
Tags: White Supremacy, Income Inequality, Democracy, Racism, Election 2020

The Promise and Peril of America

We are running the risk of putting the whole experiment of democracy in peril.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

By James Hazelwood

For the European visitors, the American continent was a vast unexplored and mysterious land in the 1600s. Fleeing religious persecution, puritan pilgrims made their way to the shores of the Atlantic coast. Part survivalist expedition, and part spiritual calling. These twin epic narratives, puritan and pioneer, loom large in the American psyche. As someone once pointed out, all great movements carry forward the dreams and neurosis of their founders.

The Puritan ethos has dominated the American spirit with its Calvinistic theology and obsession with moral purity. We see this in the concepts of “Manifest Destiny” and “American Exceptionalism.” Presidents as wide-ranging as John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama captured this in their use of Augustine’s “Shining City on a Hill” metaphor. Through the American psyche, the puritan thread would have us all believe that the USA is a divinely ordained expression of the Kingdom of God.

The pioneer ethos emerged later after early settlers realized this North American continent was no island or peninsula. The land seemed to go on forever. Even when Thomas Jefferson executed the most significant real estate transaction in history through the Louisiana Purchase, he did not know what he was getting. Lewis and Clark explored the land, thinking they would find a shortcut to the Pacific. The Homestead act allowed white people to move into the west and claim territory. For nearly 150 years, Americans were pioneers exploring this continent. The effect on the national psyche encouraged us all to see ourselves as conquerors of time and space.

The promise of these twin towers has been a spirit of adventure. Compared to other nations, US Americans tend to be more willing to explore, invent, and initiate. This partially explains the numerous inventions that have birthed here, whether Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs. The courage to explore as practiced by Amelia Earhart or Sally Ride. The initiative to birth a new form of governance in the form of representative democracy. US Americans are willing to take matters into their own hands, as the saying goes. A strength expressed in an apocryphal story from World War II was when Nazi prison camp guards thought that merely separating the enlisted men from the officers would prevent an escape plan from developing. Only later to discover that the enlisted men took the initiative and hatched their plans of escape. The idea that people could act of their own accord was foreign.

The peril of these twin towers of puritan and pioneer ethos manifest themselves in our human danger of hubris. Thinking ourselves better than others leaves us blind to see the sins of our past and present. Most notably, the dominant practice of slavery and the inheritance of racism, our male-centered orientation toward leadership, as well as hyper-individualism, which impacts both our politics and the environment.

We run the risk of putting the whole experiment of democracy in peril.

Because of our puritan and pioneer cultural mindset, Americans tend to be over-sensitive to both self-evaluation and external criticism. “Why do they hate us?” was a refrain following the event of September 11, 2001. Until recently, many Americans could not fathom the cries of African Americans and their exclamation Black Lives Matters. Since the land of this country seemed ordained by God for us to use, why should we pay any attention to the calls from other nations to address Global Climate change? If we are the shining city on the hill, should not those other people appreciate everything we do for them? Look at the robust world economy architecture we built in the second half of the 20th century.

Not only are we reluctant to hear these critiques, but US Americans are also susceptible to suspicion. The move from skepticism to conspiracy theories seem more prevalent in our nation than others. After all, since we are the good ones, anything or anyone that argues against us must be out to get us. An invisible coronavirus can be turned into an agent of a conspiracy to undermine this exceptional American experiment. Not to be exclusively the domain of extremist of the right, one can recall a 1990’s spouse of the democratic US President espousing the “vast right-wing conspiracy” out to undermine her husband.

Perhaps we are now at the height of peril. All sides of the American democratic and cultural phenomenon are undergoing more challenging stresses than ever since the Civil War.

– Our institutions of government on the federal level are at risk of one person domination;

– our economic structure increasingly reveals its favoritism along with class and racial disparities,

– our culture’s abandonment of spiritual yearnings for consumeristic secular achievements and

– our neglect for awareness of the natural processes of ecology risk, well, everything.

The promise of US America can be found inside all of the risks outlined here. US Americans can invent and initiate. Therefore we have the opportunity to reclaim democracy from the interests that seek to undermine it. One recent example is the response to the killing of George Floyd. But it can also be witnessed in the dramatic increase in activism by people who have never participated in the body politic. By all accounts, the expectations of this November’s elections are for exceedingly high voter participation.

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US Americans have opportunities to recalibrate the way our economy functions, despite our recent 50-year history of adopting policies that exacerbate income inequality. The Covid19 forced policymakers to enact legislation that would be unheard of before these times six months ago. Three examples include the $1200 direct distribution of funds to citizens, the generous $600 plus unemployment benefits along with the availability of public dollars in the form of forgivable loans to small businesses, even churches. It took a global pandemic for capitalism to adopt some forms of socialism. (ok, that’s an overstatement, but still, the activist government fiscal policy is a dramatic shift.)

We have long been suffering a significant migration away from authentic expressions of spirituality toward its growing replacement, namely the placebo called consumer capitalism. When choosing a new automobile as the thing that will satisfy the yearnings of the soul, you know people have gone asunder. Though I am among the growing minority of people who describe themselves as both religious and spiritual, I am not one of those who believe the answer is a return to the Eisenhower era church attendance. But I am deeply concerned about the abandonment of religion, spirituality, depth psychology.

While it seems Jesus has left the church building, I also believe the sacred can be encountered in other ways. (I’m sure I’ll get letters about that sentence) We would do well, and it’s happening to some extent, to revive the arts in our schools, libraries, and yes, even corporations. I believe that religion should be taught in our public schools, not for purposes of proselytizing but an enhancement. Young people would benefit from readings in the great religions and mythology of humanity. Recovery of the spiritual journey is growing among the over-50 crowd as the second half of life quest for significance looms large. Can we cultivate the seeds for that in younger persons?

I believe our connection to the earth is our greatest peril. The promise here is in a growing awareness of humanity’s impact on this planet. Climate change and the coronavirus reveal the interconnectedness of all of life. Outside of the United States, public awareness and activism are significant and beginning to pressure both political and corporate systems to enact change.

The US is lagging in this area, and we have little time to catch up. While reducing the use of plastic straws, growing your garden and driving a hybrid are essential steps not to be discounted, the massive change we need is away from fossil fuel dominance to alternate forms of energy, including renewable and, yes, safe forms of nuclear power. (We aren’t going to get to the planets vast growing energy needs with windmills.)

The promise and peril of America are profound this year, the 244th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We move forward, understanding our risks and mistakes while embracing and acting on the opportunities before us. I think we’ll learn a great deal about ourselves when we gather on July 4, 2026, for the 250th Independence Day.

Will it be a celebration of a transformation and turning toward the Promise of America?

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The story was previously published on The Good Men Project.