American Zeitgeist: The American Dream and the Real World

Copyright © 2019 Courtney D. Schlosser

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

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except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

Bookbaby Publishers

ISBN 978-1-54395-888-1 eBook 978-1-54395-889-8

Other books by Courtney D. Schlosser

Perennial Wisdom: Mystics, Skeptics and Pragmatists

The Matrix of Philosophy

The Light of Nonviolence in the Jain Tradition

The Person in Education: A Humanistic Approach

Images of paintings by Susan F. Coles

For more information: cdschlosser19@gmail.com

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the following people for support, encouragement and feedback on this book. First, there is Musoeng of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies who gave me advice and counsel on how to get the book published and the information about BookBaby publishers. My conversations and friendship with him have been invaluable. Second, the loving support from Susan Coles and her many delicious meals gave me the sustenance needed to continue this project to its conclusion. Third, there are longtime friends, former colleagues and students: Steve and Robyn Rodman, Brayton and Suzanne-Belote Shanley, Dixon George, Preston Henderson, Katherine Diehl, Dan Shartin, Ken Gibbs, Donna Joss, Sam Lalos, and others. Each has given support for my writing that has been singularly meaningful to me over the years.

I would like to dedicate this book to my former mentor at Boston University, Albert S. Kahn. Professor Kahn was a scholar and a kind and generous person. Albert is long gone from this world, but his inspiring influence upon me has been a motivating factor in my using the Pragmatic Philosophy for this book.

Love and gratitude go out to Josephine Mainelli (daughter) and C. Adam Schlosser (Son) for their presence in the world and the joyful times we have spent together. Also, I want to thank Susan Coles for the use of her paintings that appear in the book. They grace its pages with a visual creativity and colorful contrast to the printed word.

Finally, I would to thank BookBaby Publishers for their excellent services in the design, production and distribution stages of the book, particularly Karen Maneely, the publishing specialist, and the entire staff.

Outline

Introduction: American Zeitgeist

Part I Nature, Knowledge and the Human Predicament

Chapter One Pragmatism, Nature and Experience

Chapter Two: Human Evolution and Transformation

Chapter Three: Alternative Views of Evolution

Part II Ethos: The Violence and Injustice of

American Society

Chapter Four: Guns, War and Inequality

Chapter Five: Problems of the Real World

Chapter Six: Buddhist Ethics: Understanding, Action,

Mindfulness and the Liberation from Suffering

Part III Spiritus: Transcendence, Mysticism and the Mind

Chapter Seven: American Transcendentalism and Spirituality

Chapter Eight: Mystical Unity of World Religions

Chapter Nine: Language, Mind, and Enlightenment

Conclusions

Notes

Appendix

Introduction:

American Zeitgeist

Prologue

It was not always like this; or was it and we were too out-of-touch to see it? This is the question that all of us need to answer to cease living in a dream world. America, the beautiful and the country that we all may leave from to time to time, but love and desire to return to, is quite different today from the country that we grew up in and learned about in the schools of our adolescence.

Zeitgeist means spirit or feeling of the times. In 2018, on the eve of the midterm election, and the first term of President Donald Trump, America was in a state of turmoil with record numbers of people about to vote. The zeitgeist of America or any other country is forever changing, but currently, in this year, and under the pervasive and disturbing influence of Donald Trump, there is a magnified and urgent importance to the results of the coming election.

Although Donald Trump is not on the ballot, there is a feeling that every election in the country for local, state and federal office is about him. This political season has assumed such importance since it is the first time that each voting American can register their feelings about this or that candidate of their choosing and the whole country is watching and waiting.

The midterm election of 2018 decided who will control the two Houses of Congress for the next two years, the Democrats or Republicans. Democrats, Republicans, Independents and the Not-Voting (the larger group) will express their feelings on November 6th and we will know the results. Will the numbers show a mandate, a demand from the public to put a check on President Trump and his narcissistic, pathological, and destructive decisions to reverse the direction of the country; and question the childish goal of making America great again?

We now know that the Democrats control the House of Congress until 2020. The unpredictable drama of politics and society awaits the verdict of Congress and the American People.

The American Dream, the Media, and the Real World

In his run-up to the Presidency in 2016, Donald Trump said that The American Dream is dead. I disagreed then and I disagree now even more. There are a million reasons why the American Dream is not dead, the outstanding one exists on social and mythic levels since individuals everywhere have ideas, ideals and desires that are often not fully realized; and the American Dream is the most motivating ideal for most individuals in America and the attraction for millions of immigrants who want to come to this country every year. So, reality again can make a lie out of our words and desires and not everyone who immigrates to or lives in this country can realistically expect to fulfill their dreams.

But what is the American Dream, anyway? We all grew up with some version of the Dream through our families of origin, the schools that we attended, and communities of our childhood when a companion or relative would causally ask, what do you want to be when you grow up? Depending upon our identity—whether white-skinned or dark-skinned, male or female, middle-class or poor, beautiful or unattractive—you answered as best you could and usually due to the influence of the social environment that you experienced. And that marked the beginning of the American Dream—at least for you.

The real world—like the Dream—is a shifting, changing dynamic in everyone’s life. But what, exactly, is the Real World? It is the same and different for everyone, in America or any other country, for that matter. The real world is the same for everyone since society, social reality and the culture to which it belongs, is made up of other people, physical things, social events and forces that are beyond the control of you. In other words, the real world is the totality of phenomena that may stand in opposition to your desires as often as it may fulfill them. –It is just the way things are, like it or not, and most of us do not.

What follows in this book is not about Donald Trump—although he is a ripe subject for commentary—or even about the American Dream which is inevitably my dream or your dream, but it is more about the Real World that we all experience and know—to some extent. My approach to these ideas is conditioned by my background as a philosophy teacher for forty-seven years, and my personal, social and cultural identity as a white, male, middle-class, octogenarian.

Thus, you will read a lot about philosophy, particularly American pragmatism and education, social morality and ethics, scientific evolution, buddhism, transcendentalism, existentialism and perennialism—among other chapters and perspectives. Each of these philosophies has a history of development unique to it due to their ideas; and ideas are the creative forms that make a person whole, real and intellectually alive. This means that the real world creates people, the real people of American society, and not the trillions of dollars that we daily hear about as the debt or budget of the Federal Government.

Most people cannot begin to fathom a trillion dollars and the conditions of violence, injustice and inequality that it may represent. So, if nothing else, this book is about you, me and all the people whom we may know and have ever meet or even heard about. Real people, real lives, and real worlds, this totality makes up the real world; and all the dreams that they may have, realize and not realize, are secondary to who they are, as flesh-and-blood, living, aging and vital persons, in many relationships.

The Media: CNN, FOX, MSNBC, Public Television, and dozens of other stations and networks span the spectrum of political, ideological, and moral opinion. Radio stations on FM and AM networks, newspapers, periodicals, journals, and books blaring out opinions, facts, lies, and gossip, fake news and real news, with narratives of truth-telling and story-telling, and advertising every soap, cereal, car, truck, beer, service, lawyer, pill, bodily disorder, and remedy for everything and everyone. Meanwhile, the lies, confusion and chaos of claims and counter-claims kept coming.

All this and much more 24 /7, every month, year and who knows for how long? The American zeitgeist is the myth that keeps changing with time, place and each person. There is nothing forever except the infinite sky above and the Earth below and the sun and moon that silently move and play together with the stars that blink on and off through the seasons of time and change. But even this holy sun, now rising over my shoulder, and the moon falling through the trees, cannot remain as they are forever.

Time is the only known constant that is forever moving, turning the Earth in its journey around the sun and tracing the invisible lines of eternity that extend to the far-away stars of other, unknown worlds. What dreams are these now turning into nightmares and the fragile visions of hope and terror, courage and despair?

Nurturing nature, the known universe and the wonder and tragedy of human existence beckons each one of us to our solitary destiny where there is only the faith-based, paradoxical promise of eternal life and happiness. The dream, the dream of liberation from suffering and loss, is the experience of uncertainty, paradox and irony, a state of mind as complex and ambiguous as any world of nature and culture could devise or invent.

American Culture

America has always been a place of dreams and dreamers; and following the brutal and internecine wars over creed, power and wealth in Europe and elsewhere, the American Continent seemed like a new beginning, an adventure and opportunity for great wealth, success and fulfillment for all—regardless of superficial differences like class, race, gender, nationality or culture. But this illusion for a new beginning did not last for long, for the people who emigrated from Europe and beyond to America; and for over fifty million indigenous people who had lived on South, Central and North American land areas, for thousands of years—the mass migration of white-skinned foreigners from afar became a nightmare with genocidal characteristics.

Reality exists on many levels and contexts; and the reality of American culture is mythic and tribal. A primary myth of American culture is the equality of opportunity and freedom for all. Social class, race, gender and age makes a lie of these ideals. The myths of American culture are many— symbolized by the American Dream. The tribal characteristics of American culture are many and they decide the patterns of development and human diversity. Immigrant populations from different countries centuries shaped by customs, languages, and myths have all played their parts in the settling of America. Although young compared to the ages of world cultures like those of Africa, India or China, American culture is over four hundred years in the making.

The language that we use to describe the people of the American nation is familiar to most of us since it enables us to understand our differences if only superficially. Anyway, here is a very partial list of how Americans perceive one another:

Liberal and conservative, socialist and capitalist, democrat and republican, black, brown, red, yellow, and white-skinned people, working-class, middle-class and upper-class people, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transvestites, rich and poor people, ethnic minorities and everyone else, Hispanics, Latinos, and white people, native and foreign, young, middle-aged, and older people, male and female, fat and skinny, tall and short, healthy and unhealthy, etc.

The list of social, psychological and anthropological characteristics to describe our human differences is virtually endless. So, American culture is a myth too, an illusion to make you believe that there is one single reality called America. The phrase American culture, the culture of violence, is also a culture of dreamers, the dreamers of nonviolence, justice and truth. These words conceived in a dream are empty words, words without meaning or direction, pointing to nothing except illusions of reality.

The American zeitgeist is always changing in subtle and gross ways; and certainly, this is true of all cultures everywhere since change is universal. But what distinguishes America from other countries is its unique heritage of immigrants and emigration which was also true of the indigenous tribes of people of the Americas who came from Asia, millennia ago. Furthermore, the uniqueness of America is its complex and holistic interactions of people, natural resources, and cultural developments are not reducible to just one factor or explanation—although character is the word sometimes used to sum up a cultural region like America.

Words are abstract and ambiguous phenomena that humans everywhere use to communicate with each other. But words are anything but precise and non-emotional things since our words flow from our individual and subjective perspective of the world. We learn words when we learn to speak, read and write with them as we realize how conditioned our thoughts and actions are by our emotions. One of the most consequential results of language and learning are dreams—dreams that visit us by night in our sleep and dreams that we learn by day.

Dreams appear and live in the twilight regions of our brain, heart and soul. We can sometimes bring our dreams to consciousness upon waking from sleep; but dreams form in the unconscious or subconscious regions of the mind where they may remain unknown to us. We cannot know our unconscious mind until we are shocked by sudden change or through a deliberate process of awakening to what we are doing. The subconscious mind is where conscious and unconscious processes of the brain and body meet, fuse, and manifest in the forms of feeling, thought and other creative functions.

This portrait of the mind is only one of many metaphors or pictures of our essential, human identity. Therefore, in this view of our identity as human beings, there is nothing unique about American people; but in the daily and nocturnal experiences of the conscious and unconscious mind, we create ourselves through the natural and social world; and we express our unique self through the language, behaviors, and values as Americans.

Words, Violence and War

The spoken or written word can be violent or nonviolent, beautiful or ugly, true or false. These words of mine are meant to be true, beautiful and nonviolent words. But I cannot be sure of their effect upon the reader since these words are metaphors or facsimiles for what is real beyond words. So, you must give your own meaning and experience to these words, for without your own interpretation these words are empty and meaningless words, making no sense without your waking mind.

America, the culture of violence, hatred and destruction, can be known in its endless wars of expansion, exploitation and patriotic slaughter. It begins at home, where a gun exists for every man, woman and child in the country, and where over thirty-thousand people die from gun fire, not by strangers but by relatives, lovers, husbands, wives in their own homes and towns. Hundreds more are victims of mass shootings in crimes of hate, racially, xenophobically, or ideologically motivated; and they occur in theaters, churches, synagogues, parking lots, schools, public squares or wherever people gather to pray, celebrate and grieve.

Violence, where atoms dance in their voids of difference, and where the stars glow by night and burn unseen by day, the souls of the living are only known. Violence is born in the darkness of the emotions where hate, bigotry and prejudice flourish. The violence and hell of war slaughters persons randomly and deliberately, and there are no innocents and the survivors can only glorify and remember the victims in their meaningless deaths. War is where conflict, violence and folly realize their absurd and meaningless extremes, whether in victory or defeat, and it is only nihilism that is victorious in war.

The American Civil War, the war that freed the slaves and slaughtered over six hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children, changed everything and nothing. The lust of battle, the dream of heroism, the illusion of patriotism and the dream of defeating death and destruction—in the smell of gunpowder, the sounds of exploding bombs, the empty promises of glory and adventure. Now, 150 years later, there are only pictures of battlefields littered with corpuses, all twisted and mutely turned towards Earth, sky and a silent God, unwilling or unable to save the victims of war from death.

Now, in 2018, there is only the war that will never end, in the Middle East, Somalia, Yemen or Cambodia, where flags wave for the dead or the dying and fly at half-mast. Now is where birth, life and death occur, and the living celebrate and grieve, not knowing which is better or worse and yet claim that they do know. We see war continuing in the American corporate machine, in the production of the weapons of war, both limited and unlimited, and in the willingness of politicians, the media, and the producers of the propaganda keep the machine running to its inevitable destruction.

If we don’t kill enough people on the highways of America—over thirty-thousand each year—and we don’t kill enough people with alcohol consumption—over seventy-thousand each year—and we don’t kill enough people with cigarette and tobacco smoking—over four hundred thousand each year—we will soon be killing more with new drugs like heroin and the opiates and new drugs being developed, to kill the pain, stress and suffering from American life. We will kill and continue to kill our own with new ways to make money and promote addiction to wanting, desire and greed.

Now, we see war, the final war coming in the production and deployment of thermonuclear bombs on planes, ships, rockets, submarines, and satellites. War is inevitable, and it is plausible to say that the national planners, diplomats and leaders are now preparing us for the next war. No one wants to think the unthinkable or believe what new horrors and tragedies humans are capable of, when threatened by death. Therefore, to make America great, we need to make it less violent and more nonviolent, while it is not too late.

Geography and Culture

America refers to the United States of America in the North American Continent; and it differs in climate and character from country of Canada, north of its borders; and in language and ethnology from the country of Mexico, south of its borders. On its western borders of the United States lies the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic on its eastern borders, while the Gulf of Mexico occupies about one half of its southern borders. Except for the ice-cap of the Arctic Ocean and the narrow neck of land connecting South America and Central America, North America would be a large island; and it will soon be one, in geological time, due to Global Climate Change, extreme geological conditions, and the rising oceans of the world—all due to the warming of the Earth, the rate at which is caused by the burning of polluting fossil fuels.

Separated from the main landmass of America is Alaska to the north of Canada and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. There are also several territories that the United States government has legal authority and responsibility for like Puerto Rico in the Bahamas and the Philippine Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Besides these landmasses and the people occupying them, America only constitutes about 5% percent of the world’s population of eight billion people; yet our consumption of natural resources like water, food and fossil fuels amounts to about 25% of the world’s resources. Thus, we all part of the problem of an unsustainable world culture and we are also part of the solution—if we really wanted to be.

What distinguishes American Culture from the cultures of China, India, or any of the other two-hundred or so countries of the world? Can we really show what is unique to our time and place and did not exist before? The totality of what we are, as a diverse population of immigrants is best symbolized by the term culture, the anthropological term for human totality. But it is arbitrary and difficult to name a common quality, state of being or characteristic that everyone who lives in America, gets. What we can say for sure is that America is a nation composed of immigrants and manifests this characteristic in its freedom of speech, religions, and pluralistic culture.

First, America is the United States or fifty separate states, with no universal health care system for its citizens, no free public education at the college or university levels, yet it has the largest military /industrial complex of the world—outstripping by far the military budgets of the largest countries combined. How did so much wealth and poverty, plenty and scarcity, develop in just one region of the Earth? And what are the conflicts, forces and problems that threaten to tear it apart into a new Civil War, while at the same time give promise of a new beginning for all?

American culture developed through slavery, war, violence, and injustice; but it also developed from ancient Greek and European values like democracy, liberty, equality and justice for all. How could so many contradictions, paradoxes and illusions flourish in the face of economic class divisions, systemic racism, gender inequality, and age discrimination? This book can only begin to crack the door open on the Pandora’s box of economic, political and moral problems that characterize the United States in the 21st century.

American culture came about the same way that most if not all countries of the world developed: land-areas occupied by people who had lived there for thousands of years and when they resisted, they were forced off their land and way of life by mortal threat or murder. The occupation of North America by European immigrants was a virtual genocide and enslavement of the indigenous people. The lands and waters that became the United States were stolen from the indigenous Indian people—of Asian origin—who never thought about ownership of land until white European Christians arrived and brutally occupied their lands.

Clearing the lands of its thick forests and bridging the waterways of Eastern America needed tremendous effort, time and skill; and every white colonial family had to learn to perform laborious tasks like digging wells for drinking water, cultivating the soil for growing their food crops, and building their dwellings from trees, stones and bricks. Mostly, the early plans for American houses and public buildings mimicked European designs even where it was not suitable or congruent to the setting or environment.

The Midwestern and Western States of America differed in geology, ethnic composition, dialect, and patterns of occupation and development from the Eastern States. The practice of slavery, of ancient origin in Egypt, Greece, India and China, added great wealth to the patterns of development throughout the South and northern regions of the country. Racial prejudice rapidly developed on the backs of slaves and their separated families; and racism became a cancer that caused the Civil War in 1862 and the great loss of life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon border.

Among the immigrant populations from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, a nameless and indescribable totality of characteristics, contradictions and paradoxes evolved from the heterogeneous mixing of the world’s populations, forming the American zeitgeist of the 21st century. Yet settlements became the early colonies of England; and when the Independence Movement resulted in the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the original colonies became States; and as more territories were opened in the West, the United States became a larger geographical reality.

The idea of a United States of America was mostly in name only since the States were divided morally, politically and economically between the North and the South, the East and the West, then and remain so today. The central moral problem of Colonial times was slavery; and Thomas Paine, an English immigrant with a gift for writing and well-development moral sense of reality, led the movement to abolish slavery from the country. His popular publication, Common Sense, stirred the conscience of many in the late 18th century, to rid the country of the degrading cruelty and inhumanity. But it was only the Civil War that dealt the fatal blow to the scourge of slavery.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine were just a few of the early talented, educated and wealthy, white men who fought for and founded the idea of an independent Republic for all. But trouble was on the horizon from the shame of black slavery, the genocide against the Indians, the economic class divisions among the settlers, and the discrimination against women—conflicts that became systemic and threatened to the unity of the United States and around the world.

Dreams of America: Reason, Social Change, and Transcendence

Dreaming is an essential part of everyday life wherever one lives. The dreams of American society are unique to its character as a culture in that they have nurtured from a crucible of optimism, a great wealth of natural resources and people from many differing cultures. But when the dreaming mind confronts reality and others, how does it respond? And at what point does conflict and difference turn to hatred and violence towards the other?

First, there is the dream of reason, knowledge and education. The act of knowing is a product of the human mind and the many structures and functions of the body’s nervous system and brain. Yet the twelve anatomical and physiological systems of the body are inter-connected, sustain and give rise to the mind and its many potentialities. Chief among them is the potentiality of reasoning and knowing which differ from immediate experience in similar ways that abstract thinking differs from the six senses: minding, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching.

The dreams of reason give rise to the desire to know and understand things. In this sense, the desire to know and understand is the most basic function of the mind that may distinguish humans among other life-forms on Earth. Least we become too narcissistic and ego-centered, we must remain humble before the vastness of nature and the universe and realize the limits of human reason and understanding. Historically, the desire to know has produced vast treasures of knowledge about every subject of civilization; and knowledge is the intellectual basis for the most creative innovations and inventions in the arts, sciences and humanities.

The desire to learn and the joy of learning still are the most motivating factors in human growth and development. Biological evolution has played a necessary role in human transformation from the lower species of the Earth; but so, has the invisible power of the mind that evolved through natural selection and the desire to control the environment through intelligence. The desire to reason and use one’s mind for the sake of understanding, action and enlightenment, has resulted in institutions of education where the ideas, understandings, and skills for improving life in society.

Second, there is the dream of social change and life in society. The acts of living in society bring forth a great variety of responses. In a materialistic and competitive society like America, the desire to buy wealth, success and status is foremost. But this desire to consume and be more than who you are, brings with it serious psychological tensions and disorders. Chief among them are those of hypertension, alienation and the fragmentation of one’s personality. In other words, the desire to succeed in society carries with it the possibility of self-fulfillment and happiness as well as the possibility of frustration, failure and misery.

Another important meaning of the dream of social change is the desire for social meliorism. In other words, many Americans grow up believing in their power to make a difference, to improve the way things are, and to bring greater kindness, justice and freedom for all. For sure, class, race, gender and ethnic identity condition this desire and the understanding that one has about real power or control in society. But if you are born white, male and middle-class in America, your chances of making a difference in society are far better than one who is born black or brown, female or LGBT, in the working or lower class of society. And if you are born into great wealth like many of our so-called leaders have been, then your chances of further material and financial success are greater.

A third meaning of the dream of social change is that of material, financial and professional success. Possessing wealth in a hyper-materialistic society brings many possibilities; one can choose to become wealthier or use financial wealth to improve society and solve systemic problems. Giving to others, funding worthy causes, founding an institute for humanitarian values and goals, are among the possibilities of melioristic change in society. Among the worthiest of humanitarian goals is that of reducing individual, social and institutional violence and creating an institute for nonviolent ethics in American society. Among the means to this end is the abolition of the individual right to own guns in American society.

But another important use of having is in terms of knowledge, ideas and understandings. The first meaning of having, in terms of material things, money and even roles that one buys in working and living is most characteristic of the materialistic and Corporate-style of American society. And the second meaning of having is more abstract, since it goes to the most vital function of the mind like having ideas and the ability to think, form judgments and conclusions about reality.

Third, there is the dream of transcendence or spiritual liberation. The act of transcending is subtler than the dreams of knowing or living in society. The dream of spiritual liberation implies the existence of a soul or essence of the self and going beyond conventional society and living freely as an individual. Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in building his own small cabin and living alone in the woods of Walden is one example of this desire. Becoming independent of others and society expressed in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideal of Self-Reliance is yet another example of the dream of transcendence.

Like other human beings everywhere, Americans have all three potentialities of growth and development. The dreams of knowing, succeeding, and transcending are what make us all fully human, moral and intellectual beings. Furthermore, the character of a country develops over generations of time through its natural resources, material development, and the growth of social and cultural institutions. The people who populate American society and create its culture are the essential body, mind and soul of the country and do not differ from the other two-hundred or so counties of the world in this respect.

The later point is important since many Americans believe that America is exceptional giving rise to the myth of exceptionalism. In this belief, many Americans believe that they live in the best country of the world and this implies a material, moral and even spiritual superiority to all other countries. But this is a highly controversial and problematic myth or cultural belief since it stands in the way of the best relationships with people of other countries and cultures.

Psychologically, this tendency is known as xenophobia or the fear of foreigners and it leads to isolationism of the country from the family of nation-states and an exclusion of emigrant people. If we—as Americans—expect to lead the world towards greater peace and prosperity, we must learn to open our hearts and minds to others of all kinds and not just the family or immediate community that we were born into. To the ends of peace and prosperity, we must learn to live as if our own life depends upon it, making sacrifices when necessary and learning to think of our common humanity.

The American Dream is the cultural myth that inspires the desire to rise from poverty to riches, anonymity to fame, or even from ignorance to wisdom and enlightenment. In this respect, the American Dream embodies the essential ideals of American culture even though one may have to transcend the obstacles of class division, racial prejudice and gender discrimination—to name a few societal problems of America—to realize any of these ideals. The conflict between one’s ideals for living—whether as individuals or members of a community—are as real in America as anywhere else only more so given the often unrealistic and unrealizable expectations of its citizens.

In sum, Americans are not exceptional much less chosen by God since we suffer from systemic moral problems like race, social class, gender and materialistic values in relating to our neighbors. We may worship a God, Motherhood and Apple-pie, but none of this makes us holy or exceptional people. We are certainly more violent, wasteful and privileged than most other people of the world, and our way of living is unsustainable since we are currently doing nothing to prevent catastrophic climate change and everything to bring it on.

Our politics is stuck in reverse gear, our social ethics is non-existent, and the Capitalistic ideology monetizes everything, from exercising one’s body, to the use of one’s mind, and to the disposal of one’s corpse. Meanwhile, the rich grow richer and everyone else becomes poorer. And no one seems to notice that we continue to live under the shadow of a thermonuclear holocaust.

Yet we continue to dream about a better tomorrow or even a tomorrow that will never end; while everything that we know about the universe informs us that humanity lives on a doomed planet, in only one of billions of other solar systems, in a medium sized galaxy among billions of other galaxies; and there is no form—whether made from atoms, molecules or stars—that will outlast time and the inevitable and unavoidable death of the entire universe.

Nature, Change and the Universe

There is a universal Life-force within each of us and it is the ultimate basis of our individual lives. Some believe that only universal change and destruction exists, and they celebrate nihilism or the ultimate meaninglessness of everything. Others believe in Presence or the Will of God that the theistic religions celebrate; while still others may name something more philosophical like the Universal Mind and the Life-force to avoid institutional and religious divisions.

The underlying condition of reality is change—change from creative beginnings to destructive endings. This is an existential truth of global origin from the Upanishads of Hindu religious philosophy, the Old and New Testaments of the Jewish and Christian religions, and the sacred Koran of Islam. Other religions, philosophies and sciences of Asia, the West and elsewhere, assume that universal change is the nature of space, time and the universe. And even if something like God, Life-force or the Mind exists eternally and permanently in the universe, it does not alter the inevitability of material, social and existential change.

Pluralism means that there are many viewpoints, principles and forces that characterize American society and culture. Society is the social order of persons who form an association for living a secure, just and free existence; while culture is the totality of values, ideas, and conditions that affect the growth and development of individuals in nature and society. I use these two terms, society and culture, in interrelated ways throughout this book to refer to the many ways in which the American zeitgeist is unique and yet like cultures everywhere in the world.

The conflicting views within American society are present in American Pragmatic Philosophy, a scientifically inspired philosophy that opposed the traditional values of religion, the greed of Corporate capitalism, and myth of individualism, in the 20th century. Drawing upon the intellectual elite of New England in the late 19th century, pragmatism was born in the post-Civil War period when the newly emerging nation attracted a huge new influx of immigrants from the European countries and around the world. It promised nothing less than the American Dream, a beacon of light, riches and opportunities that brought millions of new immigrants to its shores by the early 1900’s.

But the excessive valuing of money, property and material success over everything else would soon turn the American Dream into a nightmare for many who were not white, male and willing to sell themselves to positions of white privilege; and as for the poor, women, and the descendants of slaves and indigenous people and non-white populations from South America, China and Asia and the Middle East, the privileges, rights and opportunities that the white Christian men enjoyed from the beginning, were only realized after a long struggle for something approximating equality; and in far too many cases, America is anything but an egalitarian culture —and especially the working white class of men and women who live in cycles of endless poverty.

Like elsewhere, the patterns of human development among American immigrants were determined by the land, natural resources and habits learned from their countries of origin. The cultural diversity of America resembles the patchwork of a quilt in its patterns of settlement and development while social class and economic divisions inevitably clashed with the systemic racial, gender, +ethnic and religious differences and has resulted in political hatred, class resentment and a festering feeling about the injustice or unfairness of the