Of American Exceptionalism and Human Happiness

It is clear to most Americans that America is a unique and extraordinary place, not only unlike anywhere else in the world but in important ways better.  That is not a boast.  It is proven reality that needs to be recognized and understood.  It needs to be understood, because America’s uniquely important position in the world is neither accidental nor imperishable.  We need to know why it is, what made it, so that we can know what we need to do to preserve and promote it.

As one place to start, we have a federal system of government with the central organization founded on a powerful written constitution, inspired of God, focused on the worth of the individual, with a government answerable to the people, restricted in powers and authorities divided among three separate and co-equal and dependent branches.  With some lapses and unhappy seasons, the American people have largely and successfully steered the nation safely and well between the rocks and whirlpools of tyranny and anarchy, however loud and aggressive those forces have been.  The 1930s of the Roosevelt years were an unhappy season of tyranny, while the Civil War was the agonizing response to the challenge of anarchy.

To point out another field of evidence of American exceptionalism, we have a very exceptional military system that has yielded important and valuable results for Americans and for the world.  Unlike anywhere else in modern history or nearly all of ancient history, the American military has always been subject to civilian authority, ensuring that it has been servant to America and the ideals of the American people, never our master.  Historian Victor Davis Hanson described recent American military history in these words:

When we list the rogues’ gallery of thugs and killers that the United States has gone to war against in the last three generations—Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Kim il-Sung, Ho Chi Minh, the Stalinists, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden—while providing postwar aid rather than annexing conquered land, it reminds us that no other country has had either the capability or willingness to take on such burdens.  (Victor Davis Hanson, “Is America Periclean?”, The New Criterion, October 2011, p.12)

Our freedom from oppression by enemies or by our own government has allowed free enterprise and human opportunity to thrive here like nowhere else in the story of mankind.  Our system does not cause these, it merely allows and protects them.  People by nature seek growth, progress, advancement, development, innovation, achievement, and all that goes into creation.  It is part of our divine nature as children of the great Creator, the Father of growth and progress and happiness.  All of these things go into what humans find as happiness.

In my grade school years in south Florida we had a reader, Singing Wheels, that captured this American entrepreneurial spirit.  Recently I was able to find and buy a copy of that reader.  Written by Mabel O’Donnell, the book not only helped teach me to read, but it helped make the American spirit part of my way of seeing my country and the world, a source of inspiration to me as a young child that has not ceased to inspire into manhood.  Here is a brief excerpt, in which the young boy, Tom Hastings, and his father are talking on their hillside above their very new town only recently planted on the Illinois prairie. 

“Yes, Tom,” said Pa . . . , “I guess that’s what we are, Ma and you and I and the rest of us—pioneers.  We have opened up new country and have built new homes.  But the people who follow will turn these rich prairies into farm lands, and towns will spring up. . . We won’t be pioneers long.”

. . . There was a thoughtful, faraway look in Pa’s eyes, as if he were dreaming a dream which he hoped might come true.

“All that hillside is ours, Tom,” he said.  “Bought from the government for only twenty dollars.  Before another year comes round, the cabins will begin to climb the hill.  And there on the very top, there by the two big maples, will be our house, a frame house built from lumber sawed in our own mill. . . .”

Just as quickly as it had come, the thoughtful, faraway look left Pa’s eyes.  “Yes, that is the way it will be, son.  But don’t forget!  It takes hard work to make dreams come true, and there is work aplenty for all of us.”  (Mabel O’Donnell, Singing Wheels, p.82, 83)

For 21^st Century Americans there remains work aplenty for all of us, not the least of which is preserving our heritage of freedom, ever under attack from the ever present advocates of tyranny and anarchy.  The next generation and much of the world depend upon our success.