The United States was founded with the explicit intention of creating a new culture. To become an American, immigrants would have to be willing to throw off their old ways and adopt the American creed. And what was this creed? It was the first (and still the most explicit) expression of the individual, rather than the group, as the social and political unit of the country. Rights and freedoms were, for the first time, codified into the law of the land as being inalienably vested in, and to be enjoyed by, each citizen. This was earthshaking in 1776, and is still a source of national pride and global inspiration today.
In its ideal form, the American creed brings disparate peoples together without denuding them of every vestige of their heritage. It is possible to be an American and still find comfort and strength from a particular culture. The only requirement is to repudiate those root beliefs that directly conflict with the legitimacy of individually held rights and freedoms. Modes of dress, worship, diet, celebration, and to a large extent ethics and morality ought to be easily retained; it is only those beliefs that marginalize others, that seek to strip another citizen of his or her individuality by cordoning him or her off into a group, that stand as antithetical to the American ideal.
Of course, this ideal, as successful as it has proven to be relative to the rest of the world, has also always been unevenly applied, imperfectly practiced, and ever in conflict with competing philosophies such as ethnocentrism and its mirror extreme, monoculturalism. For a great part of its history, the U.S. institutionally marginalized many minority groups, especially blacks, and denied representation to half its citizens based on gender. Native Americans were subject to, if not genocide, then certainly a level of displacement and cultural upheaval that was all but devastating. As each new wave of immigration brought different cultures to our shores, these groups had to scratch and claw their way to legitimacy through layers of ignorance and hostility.
Given these dynamics, it is not difficult to understand that many of these immigrants, having not received their full share in the country’s individualistic protections, sought protection and strength in their culture of origin. Some of those most articulate and most aggrieved at the inequality began to despair of the whole system, and to develop ethnocentric principles to supplant what they took to be an illusory and manipulative fiction of individual rights and identity with a philosophy that elevated the group over the individual, and their particular group over other groups. Ethnocentrists attacked the systems that they felt institutionalized discrimination. They fought established (and often exculpatory) history with a mythic and socially charged compensatory history. They advocated a group identity to present a more powerful front against what they perceived as inherently unfair political, educational, and social constructs.
This reaction engendered its own counter-reaction on the part of integrated and enfranchised citizens. But the counter-reaction took two forms: most rejected the group mentality and sought to reconfirm the primacy of the individual; some, however, reacted by going to the same extreme in the opposite direction, subsuming Americans into a single group representing a single hegemonic culture, often ludicrously called “Western culture,” as if the dozens of eternally squabbling and changing cultures of Europe, the Near East, and Eurasia could be so monolithically and statically labeled.
The loudest and most visible battles, within our schools and political parties and media, have taken place between the group advocates on both sides. Ethnocentrists and monoculturalists fight over education, affirmative action, immigration, and entitlement spending, each side playing fast and loose with history, science, and statistics in order to establish the superiority of their chosen group.
A far quieter, and yet I believe far more important, war is taking place between both of these groups on one side and the silent majority of American individualists on the other. Compounding the problem is the fact that most of us are not in one or another camp, but rather in both. Most of us generally believe in individual rights, at least when the question is put to us directly. Nevertheless, virtually all of us have also advocated or allowed the restriction of individual rights in order to further the aims of a group to which we claim affiliation. Whether it’s banning flag burning, or banning hate speech, or not allowing a person to work alongside you at a factory unless they join your politically active union, or not allowing gays to marry, it is almost impossible to go through life without at some point choosing the goals of “your group” over the rights of “that person.”
For every instance or indication of American balkanization, however, I can see a corresponding and more powerful indication of continuing integration and celebration of the individual. The internet is replacing the hegemony of the mainstream media with an army of individual reporters and entertainers. Americans are intermixing socially, culturally, and matrimonially more than ever. We still hate the big company, the big bureaucracy; we associate big institutions with dullness and slowness, and entrepreneurs with creativity and energy. To the extent that we continue to celebrate the individual path, and resist permanently giving up our rights and freedoms to any group claiming to act in our interests, we will remain Americans, and America will remain vital.
Summary
The United States has been uniquely successful in integrating individuals from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. This success is largely due to the American creed—intentional and explicit from the founding of the union—which seeks to invest freedoms, rights, and liberties within the individual, rather than within one or more groups. Each American can demand to be treated on his or her own terms, and is expected to treat others in the same way.
This simple but immensely powerful ideal provides a common ethic to which all Americans can adhere without requiring the wholesale repudiation or elimination of their original cultures. Only those aspects of a culture which seek to marginalize others based on their racial, ethnic, or cultural affiliation, or which would deny an individual his or her vested rights and liberties, must be thrown off. For most cultures, these aspects are largely the products of past strife and conflict, perceived as necessary for survival during dark times but a tragic hindrance to peaceable coexistence today.
This American creed of the primacy of the individual has come under increasing attack over the past few decades, as immigration has quickened and broadened, bringing a wider variety of cultures into contact, and also as the globalization of the economy and of the media has led to a keener perception of the disparity of wealth and opportunity between cultures, even within the U.S. The necessary tumult of historical revisionism regarding our nation’s racial past has also contributed to this conflict. Finally, a two-party political system in which both sides are steeped in the lazy, cynical worldview of group identity politics has given rise to a lucrative market for separatists and grievance merchants.
Nevertheless, I, like the author, am optimistic that the American ideal of individual primacy will prevail. Americans still root for the hero against the faceless bureaucracy; we are intermarrying at an ever-increasing rate; we are not merely inclusive of but actively curious about other cultures; most of us try to avoid offending a stranger, even as we scoff at self-styled spokesmen and their hair-trigger sense of outrage at perceived slights to their groups. As long as we continue to see each other as “him” or “her,” and not as “one of them,” we will be okay.
Posted by maryeun 
