Is the United States of America a nation?  By chance, I went to see the new Kevin Costner film, Dances With Wolves, on the same day as the American Catholic bishops were resolving to instruct President Bush in his conduct of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf, and it struck me that there is a connection between these two manifestations of moralizing.  Neither addresses directly the question of American nationhood, but both adopt a point of view which is at once typically American and in opposition to any specifically American approach to the world.  And there is some truth in the idea that, if we are a nation, we are a nation of non-nationalists.

Both the bishops and Mr. Costner start from the assumption that neither the moralist nor those whom he addresses is himself encumbered by any national, local, or cultural identity not of his own choosing.  Kevin Costner plays a Civil War soldier who goes off to the frontier and decides that, rather than fight the Indians, he would prefer to be one; the American Catholic bishops solemnly warn their president that America's enemies are entitled to every consideration due an errant brother.  Like the "voice without a face" in W.H. Auden's antiwar poem, "Shield of Achilles," our leaders must "prove by statistics that some cause is just."

Let me be clear about this.  I do not mean for a moment to suggest that either American Indians or Iraqis are not deserving of every human consideration.  Auden's poem is about the horror of war without respect to its politics, and woe to the army or nation which forgets that horror.  But, unless we are pacifists, neither can we forget that wars are also political, and that the first rule of politics is to know what side you are on.

Kevin Costner, as Lieutenant John Dunbar, does not know.  He becomes a hero of the Civil War not by his enthusiasm for his cause or his eagerness to take the fight to the enemy but, apparently, through a failed suicide attempt.  When, as a reward for his valor, he is permitted to choose his own posting, he asks to go to the frontier "before it's gone."  Already (and rather incongruously for the time) he puts a higher value on the wild things of nature than on the civilization of which he is a part, and the rest of the film consists of a kind of cultural suicide--a deliberate choice of exclusion from the people to whom, by birth and breeding, he belongs.

Of course, the film takes care to make us believe in that choice: the lonely frontier is beautiful and beautifully photographed; the Indians are all warm, funny, gentle, noble, and handsome people while the only representatives of civilization, the white soldiers, are sneaky, vicious, homicidal, ugly, and anti-intellectual.  But Americans are predisposed to believe this.  Not only is eighteenth-century romanticism about the noble savage still plausible to us, but as a nation our most devoutly held article of faith is that it is possible for us to remake our lives in any way we choose.  That is part of what the frontier is about: making a new start, assuming a new identity.

The right to "the pursuit of happiness" upon which the republic was founded has as its practical corollary a kind of absolute individualism which has the power to annihilate more traditional group loyalties.  That view of the world as a loose aggregation of social atoms rather than a complex of permanent racial or tribal, religious or economic relationships was both cause and consequence of the influx to America of vast numbers of immigrants from all over the world.  They all came looking for that same new start; they were all furiously pursuing that same individual vision of happiness.

Paradoxically, it often proves to be the case that the more individual our aspirations, the more they tend to focus on the attractions of belonging somewhere, preferably among those with a strongly pronounced group identity.  Thus Lieutenant Dunbar's transformation into a Sioux warrior called Dances With Wolves is led along by the feelings of communality that life among the Indians gives rise to: "the only words that came to mind were 'family' or 'harmony,' " he tells us.

This transformation is the result of a personal choice of what we in the late twentieth century have streamlined into the single word "lifestyle."  But the very idea of "lifestyle" is alien to the primitives whose own seems so attractive.  For the Sioux there was only one style of life.  And it is precisely this limitation of choice that makes their nomadic existence preferable to the possibilities, which are also the uncertainties, of civilization.  "As I heard my Sioux name being called over and over," Dunbar tells us in a voice-over, "I knew for the first time who I really was."

Dunbar's going native falls into what is by now a common pattern of Hollywood's sentimentalizing about the American Indians--perhaps as a self-imposed penance for its years of treating them as cinematic cannon fodder.  Yet this, in turn, is part of a larger American pattern of sentimentality.  Americans of Irish descent, for example, are the main financial support of the Irish Republican Army, even though they have no desire to live in the country they profess to love.  Their Irishness is merely one of thousands of American badges of identity.  Like the maker's logo so prominently displayed on sportswear, it offers the wearer public identification with an approved group for a moderate price--moderate at least in comparison with the cost of those more traditional sorts of belonging which demand of us a serious commitment or the adoption of a whole way of life.

Even American patriotism is heavily sentimental.  The flag is also a fashionable logo.  Our loyalty to the land which has underwritten our pursuit of happiness is not reinforced by any of the more usual accoutrements of nationhood, such as race or culture.  Instead, it tends to express itself in abstract terms like "democracy" or "freedom" which, insofar as they elicit a genuine commitment, are transferrable and do not tie us to the geographical entity known as the United States of America.

The audience in whose company I watched Dances With Wolves cheered when the soldiers of their country were massacred by Indians--not because it was an especially unpatriotic audience but because its capacity for self-identification with them was limited by the soldiers' unsympathetic human and individual qualities.  In the same way, because the Indians were individually sympathetic, the audience had no more difficulty than the hero in making an emotional self-identification with them which owed nothing to nation, race, culture, or tradition.

When Emerson said that man is a god in ruins, one of the things he meant was that this kind of spiritual rootlessness was predicated of the divine.  We may strive to emulate divinity by cutting ourselves off from such merely local and accidental connections to our fellow human beings as will interfere with our participation in the true and the good wherever we may find it.  This view of the world has always been axiomatic to Americans--so much so that we forget the ruins.  We now all but take it for granted that we can and should look at human life on earth, with all its conflicts and contradictions, sub specie aeternitatis--not as men who are strapped to a particular social and intellectual distorting lens but with the clear-sightedness of gods.

The Catholic bishops who very kindly offered their advice to President Bush on how to transcend his American perspective and make war like a god--punishing only the guilty and allowing even them every chance to redeem themselves--were speaking, paradoxically, less as representatives of the church universal than as this kind of rather provincial American universalist.  In fact, the more self-consciously American (and Protestant) National Council of Churches went even further: "As Christians in the U.S.," it resolved, "we must witness against weak resignation to the illogical logic of militarism and war."

Illogical logic?  What is illogical about war in defense of one's national interest?  The assumption of illogicality is based on the prior assumption that nationhood is an irrelevance to the very high-minded and moral things that really matter.  It is a merely sentimental attachment, a flag upon the sleeve (which were far better replaced by a UN flag anyway) of those who, if they must fight at all, are supposed to be fighting for a disinterested world justice and against not a particular instance of aggression but the very principle of aggression in pursuit of national aggrandizement.  Therein lies the NCC's "illogicality": how can we oppose Iraq's war-making on behalf of its national interest by making war on behalf of our national interest?

The answer, of course, is a very simple one: because we are us and not them, because their national interest is not ours but theirs; and when the two come in conflict we are on the side not of theirs but of ours.  Unfortunately, it is not an answer with which many in America feel comfortable.  When we go to war it is for the sake not of America as a country among other countries but for that of one of our universalist principles--to oppose the evils of nazism or militarism or communism or to make the world safe for democracy.  We would feel guilty if we thought we were only making the world safe for Americans.

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