Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

ing further back into the wilderness. The phrase became proverbial: “If youcan see the smoke from your neighbor’s chimney, you’re too near.”These separatists broke away from church at home, but separatism isalso a momentum. New religions were formed over and over again. Oustedclergymen went off into the woods with portions of their contentious flocks,there to cut down more trees and raise new churches. When Cotton Matherwent to what is now Rhode Island, he said that there had probably neverbeen so many sects worshiping side by side in so small an area. These werethe men and women who were most irritably susceptible to any of the pressuresthat society and social opinion could bring.I have recently read George Santayana’s Character and Opinion in theUnited States. In it I find:The discovery of the new world exercised a sort of selection amongthe inhabitants of Europe. All the colonists, except the Negroes,were voluntary exiles. The fortunate, the deeply rooted, and the lazyremained at home; the wilder instincts or dissatisfactions of the otherstempted them beyond the horizon. The American is accordinglythe most adventurous, or the descendant of the most adventurousof Europeans. … Such a temperament is, of course, not maintainedby inheritance [but by] social contagion and pressure.A mentality so constituted will experience in a certain way and will shapeits language—in this case, reshape an inherited language—to serve as instrumentof its perception.The Americans who removed to this country, then, during its firstcentury and a half had these characteristics in common. The conditionsunder which they lived and the institutions which they created engravedthese characteristics still more deeply into their natures.However, those basic characteristics have suffered violent opposition.It is still a question whether many of them may survive.The force and prestige of the original traits remains, however. Onehas the feeling that their expression—personal, social, and literary—has beendriven underground. Perhaps they are so powerful that they will yet be ableto furnish a framework—a religion, a social thought, and an art—withinwhich an entire continent can understand itself as unity and as growth.That was the hope frequently voiced by the great writers of the middle ofthe last century, and it was accompanied by a great fear that this frameworkmight not be obtained; for they saw very clearly that the European modes,however fruitful for Europeans, could no longer serve the American people.189