THE UNITED JEKYLL AND HYDE OF AMERICA PART III

And finally the third class of morality residing in America. It is the immigrant morality, without any desire, or likelihood, or even reason to enter the common American melting pot. It is that diverse variety of unassimilated cultures in the United States, who somehow seem to exist on their own, outside the domain of the American master culture, and inside the shells of their own respective minority communities, characterized by their general moral disapproval (usually subdued, for political reasons), of the overall moral tenor and way of life of mainstream American society. Mind you, I am specifically focusing on the secular, and not the religious morality of the mainstream, which somehow trivializes the Morality of God, itself reduced to some sectarian underground. This problem of alienation of modern secular morality from the traditional religious morality is by no means as vivid and noxious among the minorities, who often resentfully counter the social morality of the American majority with their sectarian, but workable, morality of God. The latter is only possible inasmuch as these minorities that I am talking about, even though they are happy to accept the social reality of dwelling among the American mainstream, with its material advantages, comfort, luxuries, even the permissiveness of the free society, refuse to identify themselves with the mainstream culture. They never consider that decadent and decaying culture as master culture. They are content with it only for as long as it enables them to live as they wish, and they are quite happy that the “white man’s culture” is so weak that it makes no claim on their own lifestyle, allowing them to maintain their cultural non-American roots, keeping their allegiance to them, and no allegiance, really, to their “common American home.” There are stars and stripes, of course, still evoking respect among the immigrant minorities, but these can clearly sense that the culture of stars and stripes has been suspended in a dream-world out-of-body existence, and the mainstream “white man’s America” can no longer have a claim to it, having renounced its past, in favor of an acultural, anational, amorphous subsistence.

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Not for as long as there is no movement toward the light. America is stuck in that dark tunnel between the twilight’s last gleaming and the dawn of a new day. No help can be expected from the new waves of immigration: each immigrant culture understandably wants to survive by preserving itself against the backdrop of a cultural darkness. Only a renewed great-American spirit can extricate America as one nation from her dilemma of being stuck in a dark tunnel, and make her start moving again in a meaningful direction.

But is there a sufficient national will for that? Will our arrogant Dr. Jekyll, the world’s self-appointed physician, ever realize the morbid presence of Mr. Hyde in his own psyche? Will he ever be humble enough to admit that he is sick and needs an effective treatment? In that case, and only in that case, can he really heal himself, because there is no physician in the world today or in the world to come who can do it for him.