The One and the Many - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 86

ing right-wing, he can always take these things back to the laboratory and redesign them.
There is nothing necessary about fire being hot. In another of God's universes it might be
freezing. It is like that only because God arbitrarily decided that it should be. He could
turn Glenn Beck into a bleeding-heart liberal if the fancy took him. Fox TV does not run
training camps for Palestinian guerrillas only because God has whimsically decreed that it
should not.
American ideology aspires to this Godlike freedom. There is a sense in which it is less
concerned to worship the Creator than to take his place. It is now we, not he, who determ-
ine how things are. There is, however, a price to be paid for this privilege. What is valuable
is what the will invests with value. But since this is pretty arbitrary, it comes close to ad-
mitting that there is no real value at all. Besides, how can we know that the will itself is
valuable? We would seem incapable of coming up with some external standard by which
to judge it. Another price human beings have to pay for this supreme sovereignty is that
things no longer have integral identities of their own. To think so is the thought crime of
“essentialism.” Their identities are in constant flux, always on the point of transmuting in-
to something else as the whimsical will may decide. The flipside of a faith in the world's
plasticity is a belief in the dominative mind. If the will is to be omnipotent, reality must be
softened up. It is the will, not forms and traditions, which dictates how the world should be.
Yet there are many millions of such wills, all with different purposes. So how is the nation
to be unified?
On this view, things are what we make them, a article of faith to which some of the early
American settlers clung. The belief crops up again in modern-day relativism. I have taught
highly intelligent American graduate students who believe that there are as many truths
as there are individuals. If you are committed to the view that tapioca is a grain used in
puddings, and I think it is a rather beautiful island in the Caribbean, both of us are right
from our different points of view. This is simply one example of how postmodernism can
addle the brains. Even truth has been privatised. Nor is this a recent American prejudice.
As de Tocqueville comments, “each man is narrowly shut up in himself, and from that basis
makes the pretension to judge the world.” What you make of the world is not what I make
of it. So freedom is at odds with consensus. It is hard to pluck an unum out of this pluribus ,
as the motto of the United States imagines we can.
The positive aspect of all this is its Protestant respect for individual judgement. My
judgement may not be as sound as yours in practice, but it is certainly as good in principle.
Beneath this view lies a deeply admirable egalitarianism. Yet if all of us are right in a way
that admits of no argument, the only way we can decide the issue may be by fighting over
it. Relativism can lead to violence. It is true that Oscar Wilde once described art as a phe-
nomenon in which one thing can be true but also its opposite, but you can get away in art
with things you cannot get away with in life, as Wilde was to learn to his cost.