“Even
what is best in American life is compulsory — the idealism, the zeal, the
beautiful happy unison of its great moments,” wrote philosopher George
Santayana. “You must wave, you must cheer, you must push with the irresistible
crowd; otherwise you will feel like a traitor, a soulless outcast, a deserted
ship high and dry on the shore.”
Santayana,
a Spainard who spent four decades in the U.S. as a student and Harvard
philosophy professor, must have been quite the wet blanket at those
Harvard-Yale games.
“America
is all one prairie, swept by a universal tornado,” he wrote. “Although it has
always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even when it was
covered with slaves, there is no country in which people live under more
overpowering compulsions.”
In
fact, Santayana retained enough cool-eyed mid-Atlantic detachment to see that
Americans’ feverish celebration of individualism was often just a nervous disguise,
a thin veneer covering their practice of strict conformity — and hiding it even
from themselves. These
“go-it-alone do-it-yourselfers” prostrate themselves before dogma and banners,
U.S. or Confederate or both. American corporations loathe individualism and personal
freedom, but love to peddle the illusion of both. The result is that Americans
think individualism means finding your first name on a Coca-Cola bottle. Despite
his wariness about the madness of mobs, Santayana DID cheer at Harvard-Yale
games — but not without a cooler, broader understand of what was going on. “That
Harvard should beat Yale at football is most gratifying,” he wrote to his
friend George Sturgis. “I used to care immensely about this, and one of my
projected books is largely based on that experience. It seems to me to explain
all politics and wars."
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