LETTER TO A NEW EXPATRIATE

WHAT a civilized city," you said, as you stood on the doorstep of your house, your rented castle, looking up and down the quiet street. The mellow lamplight and the shadow of the trees combined to form a second dusk, in which the sounds of nearing footsteps and the noise of an approaching car brought only mild curiosity, not apprehension. Yes, you are right: London is a civilized city. It has strikes, demonstrations, skinhead forays against hippies, and racial troubles with its West Indians, Africans and Pakistanis. But compared to America's big cities, it is profoundly at peace.

The same is true of the cities on the Continent. Rebuilt or refurbished since World War II, they gleam and they function. Crime is a frequent outrage, but not an epidemic. Police are not loved, but they are not the target of guerrilla warfare. Drug abuse is growing, but it is still an aberration, not a commonplace. In Paris, even the telephones seem to work better than in New York now, though that must surely be an illusion. All round, within easy commuting distance by clean, modern train, are the beauties and playgrounds of a wealthy, comfortable continent.

It is a joy to live in Europe's civilized cities, especially on an American income, and that is part of the reason why so many Americans are living abroad, yourself included. This is not to suggest that you are all escapists. Most of you have important jobs that need to be done. But some of you cling to these jobs with tenacity, almost desperation, terrified at being sent home. And some of you have deliberately chosen Europe as a healing exile from the fevers of America. You are not fleeing stagnation but strife, not bourgeois conformity but the rant of radicalism or reaction. What you are seeking in Europe is security, peace, order.

In Europe today, war between nations seems almost unthinkable, and the war between classes has been largely muffled in a vast, soft blanket of welfarism. But you must remember, as you enjoy the blessings of this peace, that in large measure it is the peace of exhaustion after a millennium of bloodletting. In the U.S. we have insisted on trying to contain the equivalents of Europe's wars and revolutions within one system--a fantastic enterprise.

Europe's attitude toward its history, as toward nature, is endurance. The American attitude toward history is more defiant, more domineering: "We shall overcome" is the most American of slogans. America is so much more torn today than Europe because we still demand so much more of ourselves. Europeans in their bitterly acquired wisdom smile at the demands America makes on itself, or are horrified by them. But these demands are part of our consciousness, and we must continue to live with them until we satisfy them (or until they destroy us, which is also possible).

What are these demands? One of them is our insistence on being a world power, an ambition that Europe's nations gave up, on the whole with relief, after World War II. Whatever our recent misgivings, we are still forced to play our global role by virtue of our strength, our wealth and our often dangerous but irrepressible sense of mission.

A far more important demand is domestic: the demand that we must be not only a just but an open society. Europe has produced admirably just societies, but none of Europe's homogeneous nations is as open as ours, or can afford to be. Having always been more or less amenable to foreign immigration and internal migration, we still insist on accommodating a racial, ethnic and social diversity that would tear other nations apart. The equilibrium of Britain is quickly upset by a few thousand Commonwealth immigrants. France forces its Algerian migrant workers to live in misery that has produced severe strain--although no widespread outrage. That is often the difference between the U.S. and Europe: the capacity for outrage.

Many of us seek to deny or hide the dislocations and defects of our society behind moralistic and patriotic affirmations, behind smugness and chauvinism. Yet, when those defenses fail, we erupt in a rage that is essentially self-critical. Any American failure, including injustice is an affront to us. That may be a special sort of pride, and it affects us all. Gradually, reluctantly, it moves even those who most loudly try to drown out this arrogant American conscience by proclaiming the glories of the status quo. Ultimately, we are still a nation haunted by the need for religion, and since formal religion has lost its grip on so many, we are searching for substitutes. We are not yet, in Eliot's phrase, "decent godless people." Often we are not at all decent, but rarely are we godless--in the sense that we still approach our social and practical problems with an almost religious fervor. It is this quality that gives our self-criticism its special fury. It has made us try harder than any other nation to reform our life and still preserve what we regard as our style of freedom.

The American attitude is full of dangers: of pride defeated, of aspirations disappointed, of virtue turned into narcissism and eventually into hate. Nor is there any assurance that the American passion for self-criticism and self-improvement will necessarily continue or if it continues, that it will succeed. This is precisely the point, the task one faces in America today, and there is none more exciting: the task of criticizing America without vitally injuring it, of changing the country without destroying it; on the other hand, the task of defending America without confirming it in smugness, of upholding its best values without enshrining moral mediocrity.

The feat may appear desperately difficult at times, but the means to accomplish it are still at hand in America. No one does it simply by being in the U.S. Most Americans who live abroad do far more for America than the indifferent or uncaring or hostile citizen at home. This country's very openness means that its people are free to come and go, to live anywhere without restraint or reproof. But for many, to be away from America right now seems wrong. It is that way for the simplest, the most emotional and the most practical of reasons: because America is in trouble, because America is fighting a kind of internal battle and it is good to be a part of it. This is a war to which no conscientious objection is admissible. Rally round the flag? Yes, and in a sense rally round the flag burners, too, for none of us can wholly escape responsibility for their disaffection.

What can you do at home now? Unless you occupy a position of power, very little--and everything. You can live a certain kind of life. You can demonstrate, or try to, that it is still possible to lead a reasonably normal existence without giving way to fear or fury, that it is still possible to raise children, given some luck, without turning them into implacable enemies. You can help to maintain and replenish the precious reserves of tolerance, if only with a quiet word here, a small action there. That may seem desperately inadequate against the fanaticism of both left and right, but the sum of many such words and actions may eventually sway the balance between reason and unreason. You can, above all, help redefine the meaning of American democracy, as it has been redefined in every generation since the founding. America is involved in an experiment with meaning for all the world: to discover whether it is possible to have a technological society that is also humane and just.

Of course, you can love America wherever you happen to live. But at home, right now, one's love comes in sudden bursts, like pain or memory, amid the daily clamor. What do you miss by not being in the U.S. at this time? You miss the landscapes of your real or imaginary home, whether the hills of Pennsylvania or Virginia, the fogs of San Francisco or Nantucket. You miss the inconvenience, the drabness, the dirt of our cities, and the grim, rather moving determination that something must be done about "the environment," a term that Americans are beginning to use as a joint synonym for nature and fate. You miss the girls: their long American legs struggling between mini and midi, while Women's Lib demands that their brains be finally respected, used and paid for.

You miss the endless arguments that threaten to push you beyond the brink of reason until, at moments, you find a spark of understanding between seemingly irreconcilable opposites. You miss the almost palpable effort, both painful and exhilarating, that is often required to resist anger or despair. You miss a sense of being where the action is, where the decisions happen. You miss, finally, the balance that must be struck anew each day between All Is Lost and Everything Is Possible.

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