I'm in a patriotic mood today. Last night, after listening to a spiffy blues CD, I got to thinking what a laudable contribution the blues are to world culture, and how uniquely American the style is. There are several things uniquely American that we can be proud of, not just achievements like the moon walk and defeating the Nazis, but elements absorbed by world culture, including:
Populist democracy. Well, duh. Like the Soviet Union and the French Republic, the founding fathers put an entire nation on the line for the sake of a noble experiment in social engineering. Unlike the communists and the stormers of the Bastille, the founding fathers were wildly successful, and widely exported the idea that the state serves the people. Yes, we owe some of our traditions to British and Dutch parliament, and we owe some ideas to European philosophers who had kicked theories about, but it was the American colonists who took the risks, implemented the strategies, and actually made a workable whole, along with a raft of related institutions like a free press, public education, and the belief that international relations should depend on justice rather than might.
We haven't always lived up to our ideals (consider the long delay of universal suffrage). Nor does everyone aspire to populist democracy ? religious fundamentalists and hard-eyed bureaucrats of various ?people's republics? come to mind ? but the fact that such regimes fight continually to keep their citizens ignorant of western culture says a lot.
20th Century music. I've heard cogent arguments that jazz is the ?best? form of music the world has produced, if ?best? can have a meaning in this context (richest variations, most extensive influence on contemporary musical movements, richest history of innovation). That doesn't mean you, personally, should like it the most ? I prefer baroque, myself ? but rather that it has meant more to more people and promises more in the future than any other musical style. And jazz is really just one segment of a continuing synthesis of European melody with African rhythm, expressed in gospel, blues, rock 'n' roll, all of which have earned praise in the world forum. It's no accident that this rich tradition came from America; a lively slave trade provided us with the necessary demographic, the silver lining to a reprehensible practice. The only other places I can think of with so consistent a record of infectious music are the Caribbean and Brazil, both of which did a brisk trade in African slaves, too.
Progressive attitude. Nobody, but nobody, is so deeply convinced as an American is that the future is onward and upward. And, with some hiccups here and there, the belief is proving itself correct, now that we've learned to wed it to rational materialism, scientific method, a free market, and freedom in communication channels. Give every idea a full opportunity to prove itself, pass every idea through the forge of examination and debate, and eventually, we will separate the gold from the dross. Our vast improvements in standards of living in the 19th and 20th centuries grow directly out of this attitude. Victorian England is the celebrated home of the industrial revolution, but the US took the idea and ran with it, and kept running, to the alarm of British industrialists who soon saw themselves overtaken. (The current trend towards hoarding the results of R&D projects casts some worrisome shadows on future development.)
It's encouraging, too, that the rewards of progressive institutions seem to be independent of size, wealth, or any similar inequities between nations. The Japanese economic miracle was a product of an American businessman (who, ironically, was ignored in the US until the industries which ignored him started crumpling under Japanese pressure).
Tomorrow, in the interest of fairness, I'll describe three facets of American culture I'm not so proud to have exported to the world.