Delight Springs

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Anglo-American Minds

John Lachs makes his usual good pluralistic sense with a warning, a couple minutes into Phillip McReynolds' brisk film American Philosopher, to beware talk of the American philosopher or mind or character or, really, the pretty-much-anything. It's too late for a formal rechristening of our summer class The Anglo-American Mind, but henceforth we'll just be AAM to ourselves - M is for minds, and what Anglos and Americans do with them.


It's great to see so many of my old friends featured here, saying mostly sensible things. Not one of them "hates America," but like William James they're all immunized against what he called, in that wonderful letter to H.G. Wells, "our national disease." (“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.")

Patrick Allitt, a Brit at Emory University whose "Great Course" on The American Identity, admits the danger of oversimplifying our pan-American distinctions and differences but also insists on the rootedness of cultural stereotypes in some degree of reality. Not all Brits carry on with stiff upper lips, not all Americans have an optimistic can-do, cash-value commitment to problem-solving. But those are good tropes to test. As our first week's short essays and comments begin to appear, let the happy testing begin!

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