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Americans have never been profoundly attached to their own history. John Higham, a historian at Johns Hopkins, once met a man who claimed that historical consciousness increases as one travels east. Thus the Californian, in awareness of the past, would be the moral equivalent of the housefly. The Eastern U.S. would be slightly more sophisticated, Western Europe more so. Anyone who travels in Poland, Higham says, cannot help being "overwhelmed by the passionate and complex involvement of the people with their history. We don't have that."
The energy crisis and warnings of limits give Americans a guilty fright; they know perfectly well that they have been squandering with an abstracted heedlessness, consuming on automatic pilot, like the jaws' dreamy working of a wad of gum. "Woe to them that are at ease in Zion," said the prophet Amos.
The past 15 years have pounded a sense of urgent uniqueness into Americans. In fact, anyone who buys from OPEC and fails to feel some chill of reckoning down the line is a bon vivant worth spending an evening with. But Americans need to regain a longer perspective. The period from the end of World War II to the mid-'60s was not only historically abnormal; it was unprecedented and probably unrepeatable. The nation's gross national product went from $212.3 billion in 1945 to $688.1 billion in 1965. That single 20-year period has skewed the American sense of proportion. What now seems an apocalyptic decline in rate may in fact amount to a small and acceptable subsiding after a period of economic, military and spiritual inflation that has for a while distorted the myth. Says Diplomatic Historian Walter LaFeber: "We're getting back to a period where American power, and our view of that power, and our view of American history, is returning to normal, returning to what it was in the 1920s and 1930s, when I think we had a much more realistic view of what the possibilities of America are."
Americans no longer learn much from either their history or their myth. Mussolini said: "It is not impossible to govern Italians. It is merely useless." The same thing may eventually be true of Americans. They have too much freedom; without discipline, without a sense of being responsible and useful in the world, their angers spill and slop like battery acids. They have no more justification for their endless social license than the breezes of their appetites, the whims in the glands. The psychological sense of sudden boundaries, all bets off, new rules to be made, stirs old American questions. LaFeber speaks of several kinds of American spirit. First is the historical "City on the Hill," the idea that the American mission is to create the best possible kind of society here at home: not in Nicaragua or South Korea, just here. The second kind of U.S. mission reverses the relationship. As Woodrow Wilson implied when he tried to make the world safe for democracy, the U.S. should stretch out in trying to create a hospitable environment.