I often enjoy these articles, but they never really resonate with me. I see almost nothing of my day to day life in these narratives.
Would this article describe San Francisco? New York? Seattle? Portland? Austin? New Orleans? Memphis?
I assure you that people buying a house in SF aren't surprised to find grout in the tiles or drafty windows. We're actually kind of hoping to find those things, because this means we're not paying for someone to stage and flip (even in this economy).
I think international borders are very over rated where it comes to culture shock. Not saying there's no difference, of course, I just suspect there's the opportunity for every bit as much culture shock within the US than between the US, Canada, or Australia, maybe more... try moving from central Manhattan to central London, then move from Manhattan to the outskirts of Toledo. Hell, you don't have to go that far, just go to the New York exurbs.
One of the best things I ever did was drive cross-country. Seeing the West Coast, Rocky Mountain States, Midwest, South, and East over the span of a few weeks showed me a heck of a lot that I still go back and ponder when I meet someone from a place I passed through. Little tiny things are very different.
But don't underestimate international border culture shock either - especially non-Western countries. America was basically settled by and built on Western European traditions - England, Spain, and France mostly, with some Dutch and later the Irish, Italians, and other Western Europeans. But the ex-Soviet Bloc, Middle East, East Asia are lightyears different from America, and the culture shock is pretty supreme. Basically assumptions about how the world works and should work that I didn't know I had I had to re-check.
The craziest was the Japanese on work. Raised in America, I basically took for granted that doing work is something you don't like that you do for money. Okay, some really lucky people love their jobs, but they're pretty rare. And some people manage to have an "okay job", but all our media, movies, television, and culture ethos are that "work sucks and get it over with so I can get paid and do something else."
Japan? Not the case. People actually take pride in doing work, for working. We look at the Japanese hours and think Japanese people are bat shit crazy, and I mean, maybe they are, but they actually take pride and enjoyment out of working. Comparing an American employee at McDonalds to a Japanese employee at Mosburger or Yoshinoya, or even Japanese McDonalds is a head trip. Cross border culture shock, even. Words don't do it justice, seeing the expression and gesturing and presentation of people working in Japan really is something else, as are similar things in other very different places.
This article was strong because it balanced critique with commendation. It's an interesting observation that America's "bigness" in many things is simultaneously it's largest advantage and disadvantage.
I've often felt that Americans tend to have a kind of naive optimism compared to folks from other countries. In fact, while living abroad I've felt judged by Western Europeans in particular for that quality in myself (some of my best friends are German and French, FWIW). But I think that attribute is what has contributed to much of the success in America, particularly in the entrepreneurial crowd.
I suppose Americans do have a naive optimism--I've always perceived British culture in general to be cynical and negative, but that may simply be in comparison to my own optimistic culture. I attribute a lot of that to history. The fall of Europe's empires in the 20th century was the failure of their grand national experiments, and on top of it, much of the world faced immense death and destruction during the wars of the 20th century. Europe, China, and Japan were destroyed in WWII, Korea and Vietnam faced significant destruction in their wars, and most of the communist states faced significant internal destruction through mass murder of various kinds. America largely escaped this level of destruction.
Good point. I think a lot of a culture's attitude is based on cultural memory, which comes from lessons learned (or not) from history.
Americans abroad are often elbowed about how young their country is (ugh, I lived in Beijing and they always trot out 4000 years of Chinese civilization. Nevermind the CCP is only 80 years old), but what this means is relatively less cultural baggage. Americans have less cultural memory to look backwards at and reference (and a lot we see back there like destruction of Native Americans, black slavery, etc is painful to examine), so as a result Americans have no choice but to look forwards.
We also don't have all that old stuff. Over in Europe they still have castles and palaces from medieval times. Buildings that are centuries old. With rare exceptions, Americans knock down old buildings and build new ones.
Remember there's been some self-selection here. What other than naive optimism can explain packing up everything you own and jumping across the atlantic or pacific to lead a new life in a new country?
Yet it explains almost all of our parents, grandparents, or great(^n)-grandparents. That's going to bias the culture.
That piece resonated with me. In the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), sometimes it takes a fascinated outsider to draw a properly nuanced picture of what it really means to be an American.
I think the opposite - it strikes me as much more an insight into the ideals of English culture than anything about the US. Particularly the stereotypical assumption that you can understand a vast country by living for a while in Charleston and the District of Columbia. :)
To be fair, it's from the POV of someone who's managed to spend eight years in a society without learning how to tell a joke to a stranger, but there's a reason why they say, "Americans think 100 years is a long time, and the English think 100 miles is a long way."
He does reveal quite a bit about his own biases, but he walked away with the realization that the things he would criticize most about America are also what make America possible.
...there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take.
Both of my grandfathers sacrificed everything to come here so that I could have a better life. They knew 100 years ago what many, sadly, still don't understand. The "poverty of alternative" transcends time as well as space.
They created the drive. It's my job to make sure it continues.
This sums up pretty much exactly how I feel about America having lived here for 6 years. I both love it and hate it here. This bit was particularly good:
A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes, could not, would not, save little Kara Neumann from the bovine idiocy of her religious parents.
Are you kidding? or do you have a stone for your heart?
An innocent eleven year old kid died because her parents are morons, and you respond to that with a wisecrack taken out of context.
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The night before she died - and she would have been in intense discomfort - her parents called the founder of a religious website and prayed with him on the telephone. But they did not call a doctor.
If Kara had been taken to hospital, even at that late stage, insulin could have saved her. She could have been home in a few days and chirpy by the end of the week, as my son was.
I suspect that much of America's advantages come from not just having choice, but the understanding that just because people will frequently make bad ones, doesn't mean it's a win to get rid of the ability to choose. Painful to lose people in stupid ways, but some of those stupid choices turn out to not be so stupid, in the end.
In one or more of his stories, a proprietor of a small business was lauded by the community for killing a would-be burgler and putting his head on a spike outside the restaurant. (e.g., Time Enough For Love, the married identical twins and proprieters of a restaurant).
What does that mean? His novels certainly contained violence but I don't recall any of them expressing enthusiasm for it. And a man is not his writings. Scifi authors often explored worlds with different values and conditions. For example many of his novels contemplate polygamy and alternative marriage/family structures but I have never heard anything to suggest that he himself practiced anything like that.
Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
I don't believe any society has managed to prevent murder; all they manage to do is try and sentence the guilty when they catch them, as the state of Wisconsin did to the girl's parents.
"It was an entirely preventable death caused, let's be frank, by some of the Stone Age superstition that stalks the richest and most technologically advanced nation on earth."
That's patently unfair. Much of that superstition is Bronze Age. Credit where credit's due.
Why is it that so few Europeans believe that diabetes can be cured via prayer? Is it that state-run religions aren't as market-savvy as the "free-market" churches in the US? Are Europeans better educated? I presume the author probably is also referring to an embrace of creationism as well. What is it that went right in Europe (or just didn't go awry)?
Why is it that so few Europeans believe that diabetes can be cured via prayer?
It comes down to optimism again I think. A European devout Christian would certainly pray for their sick child - but they would not expect their prayer to be necessarily answered, so they would also take the kid to the doctor. If the doctor cured the child, they may attribute the good luck to a form of divine intervention whose instrument was the doctor.
The problem in the US is that many local forms of Christianity have set themselves in opposition to science - either/or - and so the doctors are not instruments of God but His antagonists. I don't have a really good explanation as to how this came about.
Why is it that so few Europeans believe that diabetes can be cured via prayer?
People whose religion is sincere will inevitably come into conflict with religious and secular authorities from time to time. Over several centuries, most of them left Europe and went to the US, where there were no religious authorities, and the secular authorities were much more hands-off. It's not particularly surprising that their descendants still take religion seriously.
I sometimes joke that we (the British) sent all our criminals to Australia and all our puritans to America, and of course there's some amount of historical truth to this. So if the Americans remain fervently religious, why isn't Australia really a nation of criminals today?
That's because folks forget that Puritans were just one of a number of oppressed religious groups in England who shipped out to the colonies - or, for that matter, that Georgia was a penal colony, too.
It's always strange and interesting to hear people harp on one particular minority group of colonists as exemplars. Contemporary conservative religious groups have little or no connection to Puritanism at all.
Perhaps the causes or whatever drives people to be religious or criminal are not the same? Perhaps removing criminals from British society was enough to 'reform' a lot of them.The puritans chose to go to the US, I believe.
If we had sent all the criminals to the US and all the puritans to Australia then perhaps the results would have been switched.
Just a guess, but since we've always disallowed a state endorsed church, we have never been subject to a totally perverted church which is as powerful as the government or inseparable from the government. In fact, many churches here paint themselves as oppressed by government. Churches simply don't have long powerful tentacles here, like they had through much of European history.
Just speculation without any data to back it up:
* A selling point of America in the beginning was freedom of religion.
* A lot of people were killed off in WW2 because of their religion, and I wouldn't be surprised if many lost their faith because of the deeds committed under these times. (made it hard to believe in a benevolent God with a plan)
* A big catchphrase of the socialist movement was "Religion is the opiate of the people".
When I've been to USA I was surprised how much religion is used as a business (not that they say that themselves), "free market" churches are much more radical and aggressive in nature and marketing. Also, "churches" in Europe are hardly that active and much more tolerant and unintrusive.
The US is overall a more religious country. Part of it is historical--Europe shipped all their religious fanatics over here, so they were left with the boring state-sponsored churches like the Catholics and Anglicans. America also has a long history of cyclical religious revivals.
I would love to know the real answer to this. I suspect it has something to do with how easy it is to form a church here and get it tax-exempt status (I have no experience in this area of course, but from what I've heard it's much easier in the US than it is in Europe).
ShabbyDoo is definitely onto something with his guess that European government-connected churches market themselves less.
From what I understand you will be quite left-out of society in most of US if you don't go to church. Here in Sweden, as a member of church, you can have funerals, marriages and baptising at church, but the church will never really bother you to come to the Sunday service.
The Swedish church was slightly decoupled from the government a number of years ago, but fees from members are still collected by the tax office, something like half a percent at most, it varies by region (diocese?).
Mormons and other US free-churches do come here and have head quarters. I find that they pray on the poor and unfortunate ones by knocking doors and stopping people on the streets to offer their solutions. They're very much considered fringe groups though, since the Swedish church is so much moderate and yet provide ceremonies that are in demand even in the world's most secularized country.
> From what I understand you will be quite left-out of society in most of US if you don't go to church. Here in Sweden, as a member of church, you can have funerals, marriages and baptising at church, but the church will never really bother you to come to the Sunday service.
Not really. I don't. Maybe you're talking about people that belong to a particular church being pressured into regular attendance? But I belong to no church and even when I have in the past the only times I went regularly were when I was forced to as a child.
{edit} Maybe I've just managed to avoid areas like this but I've lived in the Detroit, Portland and Toronto (Canada, which I guess doesn't count). {/edit}
I'm a bit thrown by the mention of Kara Neumann. It's as if he's trying to suggest it was some major trend that wacky American law allows, as opposed to a freakish event that lead to her fanatical parents being convicted of reckless homicide.
Yes, that was terribly weak. One story is still an anecdote. Data looks something more like http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/oct/10/gender.ukcrime (since our author is a brit), but I say this not to directly criticize the UK either, but to point out that if that's not a fair to "understand" Britain and Wales through that news story, than certainly it's not fair to understand America through that one either. Poor form.
I upvoted you because you're right and it's a good point, but the author's statement has some validity. Freedom of any religious belief is more sacrosanct in America than anywhere else I've visited. That includes freedom to practice some really cultlike, destructive practices. I won't call out any religions in particular, but there's a number of recognized and protected religions that do things that would be criminal if they weren't religions.
My opinion on the religious makeup of America: 10-20% of our recognized religions increase peace, tolerance, community, create a common bond, shared interest, and good community with good people, and are a strong force for the world. Half of the religions are good and bad - they create a community and inspire some good works, but also a lot of hypocrisy, missing the "bigger picture", and some other faults. 30% of religions here are really ugly - they actively cultivate an "us vs. them" dynamic: Very enemy centered, trying to whip their flock into an angry frenzy against other faiths and people with different beliefs. Some good works - really - but a lot of hate speech and creating distance and intolerance and generally being bad for the world. Finally, the worst 10% have all that plus prohibitions on life-saving things, or permission or encouragement of things that destroy mental and physical health and life of the members in addition to the intolerance, hatred, hypocrisy.
I love freedom of religion, and the "good to okay" 50-70% of faiths do some great things in the community and for their members. The other branches, sects, divisions, and religions are really bad news though. I'm not sure how anything could be done about it that wouldn't be twisted into targeting unpopular faiths rather than "bad" ones, though.
In Europe, lower classes* are obsessed with upper classes, and vice versa. In America, neither cares about the other. The upper classes are free to live in their own world (much as the great artists of the Renaissance), while the lower classes, left to their own devices, become grotesque. America is really two separate nations.
Am I delusional? This seems so clear to me, and yet I haven't heard it anywhere.
*I'm not talking about "class", exactly. This is not about social standing or money, but the ability to influence the world, and not necessarily in a highly visible way.
"But America speaks to the whole of humanity because the whole of humanity is represented here; our possibilities and our propensities."
Sounds a bit Nazi, a nation over all others ...
God bless America, we, the people of the Earth are proud of seeing it, understanding it and learning from. And (now as the world order is changing) we are inviting Americans to see us, understand us and learn from us.
And God bless we are living fast times. Our grandchilds won't ever think in terms of nations, borders and states
What a terrific article! I know a comment like that doesn't add much to the discussion, but as a native American, I'm not sure I have much to add to it anyway. :)
Actually, I've been to USA for quite a lot of times (in which I stayed for several months) and came back with no problem… America is a place of extremes, be those good or bad. So getting back home is very easy if you consider the bad stuff, like the high criminality in some places (looking at CSI just doesn’t feel the same as when I lived in Europe), the religious towns where Jesus is some kind of money making superstar, the wasteful mentality, the obscene hospitalization prices etc. But of course for all the bad stuff there is an equally extremely good side, like the openness of people, the energy and get things done attitude, be it having a block party on top of an apartment building in NY queens in 5 minutes to starting an NGO or a firm, the by and large hardworking people, the creativity of the place is quite high also etc.
Would this article describe San Francisco? New York? Seattle? Portland? Austin? New Orleans? Memphis?
I assure you that people buying a house in SF aren't surprised to find grout in the tiles or drafty windows. We're actually kind of hoping to find those things, because this means we're not paying for someone to stage and flip (even in this economy).
I think international borders are very over rated where it comes to culture shock. Not saying there's no difference, of course, I just suspect there's the opportunity for every bit as much culture shock within the US than between the US, Canada, or Australia, maybe more... try moving from central Manhattan to central London, then move from Manhattan to the outskirts of Toledo. Hell, you don't have to go that far, just go to the New York exurbs.