(3 of 5)
More puzzling and complicated than language is the American social syntax. The first impression is one of dazzling and rather unsettling informality, an indiscriminate camaraderie. But one learns that going to the opera in shirt- sleeves (an outrage, surely!) does not mean contempt for culture or even necessarily a lack of rules. Calling the boss by his first name, which takes some effort, does not mean that he and the office boy are equals. Indeed, equality is both the great illusion and the great reality of America. The immigrant is slow to understand that below the egalitarian surface there are hierarchies and tribes, proper and improper addresses, great names and lowly names, old money looking down on new money, older immigrants looking down on newer -- a topography to which there are very few maps.
But after this discovery there gradually comes yet another insight that whipsaws the immigrant back toward the original perception: there really is no fixed social structure after all. There is above everything else that much vaunted mobility -- from place to place, career to career, status to status -- which turns so many native-born Americans into immigrants in their own country.
In philosophical terms, Europe (or Asia or Africa) is the world of being; America is the world of becoming. In Europe, one is what one is; in America, one is what one does. To the immigrant this is a discovery of high excitement and also of some anxiety. Opportunity is not just opportunity but an imperative and a reproach. If anyone can make it in America, why haven't you? If anyone can be what he wants to be, why aren't you more?
There follows the suspicion that making it is the only American morality. But no -- it can't be that simple. The first tangible hint of American moral attitudes comes on the immigration form: the solemn requirement to swear that you are not a Communist, or not a prostitute, or whatever. To those coming from older and more cynical societies, this is the utmost sort of naivete. For the immigrant, it foreshadows the American conviction that one can mandate, even legislate morality. That conviction represents an amalgam of Puritanism, with its belief in a permanently flawed human nature, and the Enlightenment tradition, with its belief in the perfectibility of man. Cotton Mather, meet Thomas Jefferson. This contradictory combination bespeaks the sheer and sometimes hopelessly unrealistic determination to overcome any evil that cannot be ignored, the refusal to accept the status quo in the universe.
The moral landscape the immigrant left behind was usually dominated by the spires of one church or perhaps of two churches living in uneasy peace after centuries of bloody contest. He is therefore overwhelmed by the dizzying variety of religion in America, by the churches, sects, subsects and cults that proliferate in a sort of spiritual shopping mall. But he learns to appreciate the fact that a country that can create God in so many images, no matter how eccentric, has never used fire and sword to impose a faith on its citizens.