The One and the Many - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 80

the Welsh and not vice versa. Any pub table of Irish intellectuals is mathematically certain
to be wrangling over Irishness. Scottishness is as much a commodity as shortbread in Ed-
inburgh or Aberdeen. National identity becomes an issue when something has gone awry
with it, just as one's body becomes a talking point when it breaks down.
America's self-consciousness also springs from the fact that, being such an ethnic hodge-
podge, it needs to proclaim a singular identity more insistently than, say, China or Den-
mark. Hence the panoply of flags, emblems, slogans and insignia. No household in Ireland
would fly the national flag except perhaps as a joke, or because their rugby team was about
to be hammered yet again by France. Houses in Britain which fly flags tend to display
not the Union Jack but the St. George's flag, a gesture which can have racist implications.
America, however, seems a country which is always about to fly centrifugally apart, frag-
menting into its various social classes and ethnic subcultures, and is thus always in need of
being pulled centripetally together. There is no such necessity in a minuscule place like Ire-
land, where the problem is not one of fragmentation but of too much homogeneity. Every-
one in the country was at school with everyone else, and the grandfather of the optician
across the street probably shot dead your own grandmother's butcher during the civil war
that followed upon national independence. Irish memory goes a long way back: a friend
of mine in Dublin had an acquaintance who served Mass for a man who saw the invading
French fleet land in Ireland in 1798.
Small nations tend to breed cronyism, corruption, mutual contempt, envy, backbiting,
back-scratching, and (supposedly the besetting Irish vice) begrudgery. Their conflicts are
often the upshot of being too intimate with each other, not too estranged. “Great hatred,
little room,” as W. B. Yeats wrote of Ireland. America's problem, by contrast, is to ham-
mer some unity out of those sublime spaces and astronomical distances, a project which
can be achieved after a fashion by conspiracy theories. In a nation as unimaginably large
and complex as the United States, it is gratifying to feel that the whole thing is somehow
intended—that it is shaped by a secret but coherent design, such as the fact that Western
governments have entered into a clandestine agreement with the Arab world to undermine
conservative Christian values by flooding the West with Muslim immigrants. Quite why
Western governments should indulge in such pointlessly self-destructive behaviour is not
immediately apparent, but the theory at least has the virtue of turning a formless mass of
events into a shapely narrative. It is far more enthralling than the boring view that Muslim
immigrants are just coming to the States to find work.
In conspiracy theories, as in detective stories and the paranoid mind, a sneeze is never
just a sneeze but a symptom of some deeper, invisible march of events. Conspiracy theories
see the world as too stuffed with meaning, and in doing so compensate for a reality which
is too bereft of it. Better to glimpse a sinister purpose everywhere you look than to face the
fact that nothing means anything. Human beings are ready to will anything at all, Nietzsche
remarked, rather than to make do with meaninglessness. People who seem to live perman-