American Notes (4)

To me, any tribute to the US must include something about the life of the mind in America. After all, I spent my time there working in academia. It's what I know best about the US.

The modern research university is not an American invention (it is German) but the Americans perfected it by combining it with a home-grown invention: the land grant university. By the late XIXth century, the US was dotted by lots of research universities, some of them in the most unlikely places.

If some day in the future the US is demoted from its position of dominance in the world (something I don't think will happen in my lifetime), I hope this particular innovation is retained. It is one of the great contributions of America to world culture, and a relatively unappreciated one. The best American universities are the best universities in the world by far. It is very likely that they are also the largest reservoirs of human knowledge ever built.

I'm not talking only about physical resources like the multi-million volume libraries or the multi-million dollar laboratories. Probably in the not too distant future libraries may become digital and accessible from anywhere in the world. But there's also the human factor.

American-born intellectual traditions are neither too numerous nor too old. In my corner of the woods, philosophy and the social sciences, it is probably only with the emergence of the Pragmatist school that American philosophers began to produce something of note to other peoples. (Let me get this off my chest: in school we were taught to revere Ralph Waldo Emerson as an American Kant. To me they are not in the same league by even the longest of long shots.)

But by the same token, the US became the hub where the best of contemporary culture would meet. Virgil Thompson might be a relatively minor musical figure (and, I would say, Aaron Copland, "Fanfare" and all, is relatively second-tier), but America hosted Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok and many others. When I lived in Chicago, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Marc Chagall had presented the city with a set of mosaics, in gratefulness for its hospitality. Growing up I dabbled in chess and many of my idols of the early modern chess were Central-European. Later I learned that many migrated to the US (Steinitz, Lasker and, of course, the Cuban Capablanca). Such quintessentially German products as the founders of the Frankfurt School spent time in the US. A propos the Frankfurt School, I think that part of Habermas's greatness is precisely the way in which he blended German traditions with the influences of Analytic Philosophy he acquired in the US.

If you want to find the leading experts on French post-modern thought, chances are that many are in American universities. I saw Derrida giving a lecture at Stanford to a packed audience. Last year, the latest installment of Re-Thinking Marxism took place in its usual venue in Amherst, Massachusetts. These are just a couple of examples. There is just no limit to the diversity of voices you can find in American cultural institutions.

I would add that this goes beyond culture. I used to elicit a laugh out of my students by telling them that as foreigner I had concluded that there is no idea so crazy that you will not find at least five thousand Americans willing to support it. When I was at Stanford, way before the advent of the Nigerian email scam, I ended up, without ever knowing how, in an email list of the Peruvian Shining Path's office in New York. You want to join a Nazi Party? There are a few in the US. You think that Pol Pot might not have been such a bad guy after all? I'm not sure, but I bet there's an American-based website for that.

Of course, there are drawbacks. Mass production in the social sciences has a lot of negative effects (don't get me started, I'm trying to be positive here). But all in all, I don't think there has ever been an era and a place with such a variety of voices as the American university.