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De Tocqueville sees a link between America's belief in infinite striving and its ethic of
equality. In hierarchical societies, your rank defines your limits. It sketches the contours of
the possible. The behaviour of an ancient Athenian rope maker was constrained by the re-
quirement that he behave like an ancient Athenian rope maker. Where rank is less of an is-
sue, anything seems conceivable, and the scope of human perfectibility, in de Tocqueville's
words, “is stretched beyond reason.” The typical citizen of such societies is “searching al-
ways, falling, picking himself up again, often disappointed, never discouraged.”
As far as rank goes, one might add that though the United States today is a grotesquely
unequal society, its everyday culture is a good deal more egalitarian than that of Britain.
There is a genuine classlessness about America's behaviour, if not about its property struc-
ture. Like American frankness, pleasantness and sociability, this oils the wheels of social
intercourse. By contrast, it is almost impossible for two Britons to meet without each of
them instantly picking up the class signals emitted by the other, like animals who send each
other messages in the form of low drones or high-pitched squeakings. To be sure after two
minutes' conversation that your companion attended an expensive private school is almost
within the capacity of a British six-year-old. To know which school he attended requires a
finer attunement of one's social antennae, but is not out of the question.
Throwing out hierarchies, however, is more than just a political matter in the States. It
is also a way of seeing the world. Things do not spontaneously sort themselves into an or-
der of priorities. For some extreme versions of this viewpoint, nothing is inherently more
significant than anything else, rather as a duke is not innately superior to a bootblack. In
one sense, this is a deeply liberating attitude. It frees America from the gradations and ex-
clusions of old Europe. It can break out of these rigid rankings to revaluate the whole of
reality. This takes a degree of boldness and vision, and the United States has both in plenty.
At the same time, there are limits to this outlook. Hierarchies of value die hard. It is dif-
ficult not to feel that curing leprosy is more important than powdering one's nose. Much
as one may hate being a hierarchicalist, one has to acknowledge a sneaking preference for
preventing genocide over promoting the sale of jelly beans. Perhaps it is better to confess
that one is sadly unreconstructed and try as hard as one can to find Rod Stewart as talented
as Regina Spektor.
The anti-elitist spirit is part of America's rejection of the Old World, in which everyone
had an allotted place and was expected to keep to it. Against this, the United States believes
in a radical equality of being. It is true that the American Dream, with its faith that any-
one can scramble to the top, sounds rather more generous than it actually is. Anyone can
jump off the Golden Gate Bridge as well, but not many actually do. (It is a sociological
fact, incidentally, that those who do so tend to jump off facing the city of San Francisco
rather than facing away from it.) “Anyone” sounds excitingly close to “everyone,” but it
is also depressingly close to “no-one.” All the same, individuals could now be judged for
themselves, not respected simply because they were the nephew of a count.
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