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STEPHEN SPENDER
of the world. The past, a language of mysteries and rituals, would
be translated into the present, a language of diagnoses and cures.
The idea of Americanization is usually connected in people's
minds with American "know-how."
It
would be more exact perhaps
to speak of American "know-why." American man
is
not so much
rational man (an impossibility!) as rationalized man, w'ho breaks
his
own personality down into questions for which he seeks to provide
answers.
For the rest of the world, the feeling that all the values of living
can be restated as sociological or psychological problems, and that
all
other values disappear into the one of supplying answers to them,
seemed a nightmare. Yet Europeans looking at America were Caliban
raging at his own face in the glass.
America confronts the world and says: "This
is
your future."
It converts
alI
human requirements into problems which can be an–
swered by a consumer meeting a producer. Even mysterious and un–
explained human aspirations - such as someone wishing to meet
the right sexual partner - can ultimately be analyzed and reduced to
the same terms of a supply meeting a demand. Being in love or
believing in God can both be analyzed into "problems." Anyone
who insists on the impenetrability of mysteries is himself, together
with his mysteries, in need of analysis and explication. A sophisticated
form of Americanization is that the rationalization can catch up even
with the irrational need, find reasons for it and supply it with com–
mercial noncommercial-seeming objects. There can be a mystery
market to supply mysteries, just as there can be a consumer market
of nonconsumer goods for those who dislike consumer goods!
American solutions, in selling to people, together with the prod–
uct that satisfies some of their needs, the idea that they are average
consumers, create Americans. For already, in being a nation made
up of nationals drawn from the rest of the world, America
is
the
model for a world in which everyone becomes American. There
is
no reason why the process of Americanization should not work cen–
trifugally as well as centripetally. Instead of people from
alI
over the
world going to America and becoming American, America can go
out into the world and make everyone an American.
That large numbers of people
alI
over the world believe
this
might happen produces a fear of a force which they feel to be greater
