Purple Mountains, Mysteries

How long will the United States of America last?

It might seem unpatriotic to ask this question, but I don’t see why anticipating that your country is not eternal means that you don’t love it. There are things which may be called eternal, but nations are not among them.

No one really knows what a nation is, but we all know what a nation is “not only”…a nation is not only its government, which is good, because we replace ours quite regularly. A nation is not only its people, which is also good, because not that many of us will live to see much of the next century. A nation is not only its laws, its industries, or its art. The spot of ground on which a nation sits will probably outlast all of these things, but certainly a nation is not only its real estate.

It seems likely that a nation is a combination of several, perhaps most, of these things. Which things, and in what proportion, no one is sure, but everyone’s got a vague opinion. Our opinion of what things make up the United States as a nation is what drives us to preserve certain of them. We do this because we want our nation to live forever, until the end of the world.

And even if millions of years pass, and the real estate that currently houses the United States of America melts away under epochal geological pressures, might that still not be the death of the United States, if the United States is lucky? Might we live on, somewhere else, maintained by whatever combination of law, culture, and tradition it is that makes a nation?

So, how long will it be?

This is a trick question, because when we speak of the United States coming to an end, what we really mean is the United States as we know it coming to an end. Because the greatest likelihood is that we’ll still be calling something the United States of America long after there is nothing around that even vaguely resembles what we today consider the United States of America. It’s human nature to hold on to the names of things past the point where they accurately describe what they once did; this is completely natural, and the meanings of the names simply change. But the thing they once described is gone.

People who examine the American “way of life” have been contemplating the point at which America ceases to be the same America that they made in 1776 since, oh, about 1777. It tends to be the most rigid adherents to a particular ideology and narrow conception of America that engage in this type of thinking; for example, white supremacists talk about how America ceased to be America in 1865, with the defeat and occupation of the true America by a bunch of Jews and black people. The ACLU, to my mind a principled organization, also talks this way sometimes, saying that certain alterations to our laws that protect civil liberties have made it so that America is not America any more. The proponents of liberty-limiting laws say that, “The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.” But, to the mind of a doctrinaire civil libertarian, of course it is. Take away the Bill of Rights, and you can call it America, but the nature of the nation has changed beyond recognition.

In looking to the future, other thinkers anticipate great changes for the United States of America, as well, changes that might also convert us into something other than what we are. James Kunstler talks about fossil fuels, our dependence on them, and how their eventual depletion will remake the United States as some kind of pseudo-feudal agrarian country. People who don’t like the United Nations anticipate with fear a world in which our national sovereignty is checked by the decisions of foreigners. Depending on how you conceive our nation, either of these developments could mean the end of the United States.

Oh, there would still be a place called the United States. It would just be someplace else, with the same name.

I think that it is probably best not to worry about whether we really are what we say we are, or whether we have become something else. Because we’ve never really gotten around to agreeing what a nation is, anyway, there’s no way we’re ever going to agree when we’ve stopped being it. Our vague opinions of what the United States is are just too…well, vague. We speak of the American Dream, but maybe America is only a dream, that is a vague set of ideas that we have feelings about but cannot name precisely enough to constitute a definition. Maybe, just maybe, that’s all right. Maybe we can live with that.

Let’s just be what we are, and call ourselves it.