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Whether Americans are criticized or praised for their supposed lack of patience, the basic assumption is probably wrong-just another of those monumental cliches about the U.S. character that clutter the intellectual landscape. While Job is not exactly a national hero, there is every evidence that-below the surface-Americans are an exceptionally patient people, and becoming more so.
The early church fathers would have examined Adman Ogilvy carefully for horns and a cloven hoof if they had heard his contemptuous put-down of patience, a paramount Christian virtue. St. Paul rated it a "fruit of the spirit" and St. Augustine called it "the companion of wisdom." Saints had it: the ultimate in provocation is proverbially "enough to try the patience of a saint." Sinners had it not: they complained and lamented. The Jews waited as patiently as they could for the Messiah and the Lord's Kingdom that would right all earthly wrongs. The Moslems told one another that patience was "the key to Paradise" and "a gift that Allah gives only to those he loves." Patience, in short, was the core of religion in a world where life was hard, society was static and hope lay in the hereafter. Patience meant resignation-a necessary quality for tillers of the soil and fishers of the sea, whose control over what happened to them was marginal. In such a frustrating scheme of things, outbursts of personal rage must have been no small social problem. The Ship of Fools, a 15th century compilation of doggerel homiletics by a German satirist named Sebastian Brant, warns that
Plato too suppressed his rage And Socrates, for they were sage. Impatience born of irritation May lead to sin and dire damnation.
The dawn of science and the rise of the merchant middle class changed the very meaning of patience. Observing, recording, experimenting-patiently piling their slow-baked bricks of knowledge into steps leading upward toward freedom and control of nature-the pioneers of science began to give patience a positive ring, a means to hope within the here and now. At the same time, the capitalists, gradually replacing the aristocracy at the top of society, were demonstrating what the patient, longview investment and reinvestment of money could do to liberate men from the conditions they were born to. Patience was no longer quiet resignation but purposeful action toward a long-range goal.
The subsequent series of revolutions that shaped the modern world show an instructive pattern of contrast. The French Revolution-like the French themselves-was wildly impatient. Utopia was to be now. built on the flaming brain of Reason and the decapitated corpses of the misguided opposition. The Russian Revolution was another Utopia supposed to rise from blood and blueprints, though it looked to a longer time and more corpses before the socialist Eden would be achieved, and counseled strategic patience in following the drive of history.