A COUNTRY WITHOUT PRE-HISTORY
149
For the American, freedom in the active sense is predicated,
instead, on his faith in the superability of all limits. These limits are
the problems, the obstacles of practical life; his freedom therefore
consists in progressively solving his various problems. It is clear
that the very faith in the ability to remove practical obstacles keeps
the American attached to the objects of his efforts.
It
is
true,
also, that for the American an object or a problem is transformed
as it
is
tackled; but the transformation occurs in the external
realm; a gadget is being modernized, a new remedy found, an or–
ganization improved. In other words, the aim or criterion of trans–
formation is meaning, or utility,
in
the social sense.
If
what we have tried to say so far is true at least in its gen–
eral outline, then it should be fairly easy to "understand" a great
part of what appear to be contradictions in the American men–
tality. We have seen, for example, the cult of liberty while we knew
that in several respects the American is rather a conformist. On one
side we have the jealously guarded right to worship freely while on
the other side we find, particularly in the small centers of the
United States, strong social pressure brought upon the citizen to
go to church or to belong to one or more of the many auxiliary or–
ganizations connected with churches. On one side we have a re–
markable emphasis upon freedom of speech, on the other side we
have in every town the Rotary Club or other civic organizations
which practically force speakers to confirm the group in its preva–
lent prejudices.
There are at least three reasons that "explain" these and
the many other examples of conformism that one could cite. First,
we have to keep in mind that the Constitution represents the cen–
tral part of the American mythology; that the answers given by the
Constitution to the many social and political problems are religious–
ly accepted by the whole community. Secondly, we have seen that
liberty in the active sense is a matter of faith rather than of pre–
cise
definition. While in the traditional countries liberty in the
active sense has its precise forms (or content ) , as expressed, for
example, in the self-restraint of the artist or in the choice of a moral
task, forms or restraints which are historically prepared
if
not de–
termined, liberty in America moves still between the extremes of
the arbitrarily free as far as certain aspects of individual life are
