The One and the Many - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 85

should, he adds, be offended by such customs back home, but charitably overlooks them in
the as yet embryonic nation across the Atlantic.
Formality can indeed be constrictive, but America's distaste for it means that dignity is
not what it does best. Three young women who appeared on U.S. television recently to
plead for the arrest of their brother's killer seemed like any other young people in the world
assigned such a mournful task, except that all three of them were chewing gum. Allusions
to slam dunks and home runs are ritually inserted into serious political commentary. Sport-
ing metaphors infiltrate official language far more than they do in Europe. When George
W. Bush spoke on television, it did not seem out of the question that he might suddenly
pull a toy fire engine out of his pocket and run it up and down his sleeve while making
brrmm-brrmm noises. A lack of gravitas is the price Americans pay for their attractive ease
of manner. If Barack Obama is an untypical American, it is not because he is a closet so-
cialist or was born on Venus, but because he is able to be relaxed and dignified at the same
time.
Soft Cosmos
Forms and traditions, then, cannot be relied upon to unite the nation. They constrain per-
sonal choice, and constraint in the United States, except when it comes to locking up child
pickpockets for three consecutive life terms, is in general frowned on. It is part of the
affirmative spirit of the nation that there are few given restrictions in human life. Some
restraints, regrettably, are essential, but for the most part they are limits we impose on
ourselves, and thus testify ironically to our freedom. If I handcuff my wrists, lock myself
in a sack and hang myself upside down from the ceiling for a year or so, my liberty is not
fundamentally affected. After all, I did it all myself.
To the medieval mind, the only truly unconstrained being was God. Yet if God's freedom
was to be perfect, it could not be confined by the world he had created. If it was, he would
not be all-powerful. He would be as much constrained as we are by the fact that blood co-
agulates, or that you can hire a horse and carriage in Luxor. Some medieval thinkers there-
fore taught that God was no respecter of the logic of his own Creation. Because he made
the world, he could do what he liked with it. It was his private property, and he could anni-
hilate it tomorrow, or turn it into an enormous Barbie doll, just as you are free to rip your
priceless Rubens to pieces if the fancy takes you. It was this way of seeing, one which
made much of the supremacy of God's will, that was to win out in the modern period. After
a while, the divine will was replaced by the human one. The world was now our private
property, to be disposed of as we wished.
On this view, there is no necessity to the way things are. If there were, then God would
be subject to the laws of his own universe. In fact, however, he suffers no such indignity.
If he grows bored with fire being hot, the royal family being cold, or Clint Eastwood be-