Four

Abstract

This chapter assesses whether America deserves to be placed alongside those Asian societies which, for all their progress, remain more or less shackled by tradition. The United States has been for more than a hundred years the very image of modernity. In the postwar decades, it appealed to European intellectuals such as Sartre on account of its deracinated life. The music, the literature, the architecture of those years were an extravaganza of countercultural passion, breaking with every convention. If people now feel that Americans are after all too conventional, there is reason to suspect that something else is happening and that their love affair with religion, guns, and the death penalty is to be explained from sources other than the persistence of traditional structures. The chapter offers an alternative explanation, looking in turn at these three peculiarities of American culture. It also considers an element of contemporary American life where differences with an older European sensibility seem clear enough: political correctness. Ultimately, one can see that a distinctive mark cuts across American experience as a whole, becoming more visible in those areas where it breaks away from its European past. One may call it the marker of a new civilization.