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to abolishing poverty, if all of its mental strivings are guaranteed to succeed. The United
States has a larger proportion of its population in prison, higher levels of mental illness,
greater rates of teenage pregnancy, a lower level of child well-being, and higher levels of
poverty and social exclusion than most other developed nations. Perhaps this is because its
people have not been exercising their wills in concert. Perhaps a date and time should be
appointed for, say, the willing away of criminal gangs, when great hordes of people can
emerge civic-mindedly on to the streets and bend their collective mental efforts to this end.
The will is a modern substitute for the Almighty. Men and women can achieve great
things by its power, but since to the puritan mind they are naturally given to devilish
devices, this will come about only if they are constantly prodded, spurred on, mentored,
exhorted, preached at and morally browbeaten. Otherwise they will lapse back into their
natural-born turpitude. Hence the constant moralising, sermonising and cheer-leading of
American society. It is no wonder that it venerates sports coaches as much as it does, given
that they spend their time bawling at people to improve their performance.
It was a communal act of willing that brought America about in the first place. The na-
tion itself is the work of the will. It is not just a country like any other, but a project, a voca-
tion, a mission, a destiny, a spiritual enterprise. Nobody thinks this about Belgium. It is not
the case with Wales, Slovenia or the United Arab Emirates, which some Americans might
suspect is a movie company. Britain is not the work of the will. The British never planned
their empire, for example. It just fell into their lap in a fit of absent-mindedness. They
awoke one morning to find that they were governing India, even though nothing had been
further from their thoughts. They did not particularly savour the prospect, but it seemed
churlish not to get on with it.
Other countries just grew, while America was deliberately thought up. It is more like an
automobile than an amoeba. It is unlike other nations not just because it is richer and has
more jet fighters, but because it is less a chunk of land than a Platonic ideal. The United
States has been called by God to be a model for other nations, which is to say that it is the
very essence and paradigm of what nationhood is meant to be. It is not just a nation but
the
nation, rather as a Hoover is the very archetype of a vacuum cleaner. There are places in
the world where patriotism has replaced religion, not least in the case of nationalist move-
ments. In America, patriotism is a form of religion in itself, since it reveres one of God's
most precious creations, the nation.
Whether the country is strong and prosperous because it has been divinely chosen, or
whether it was chosen because it was strong and prosperous, is not entirely clear. It was not
because of their individual merit that the Jews were Yahweh's favoured people. They were
simply born into this chosen nation. The same is true of Americans. You do not normally
choose to be an American, any more than you choose to be covered in freckles. It is not in
that sense a matter of innate qualities. Yet it is hard to avoid the feeling that God chose the
United States as his number one nation because he recognised its inherent merit, foresee-
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