Americana
The subject of our course, like its musical namesake, is diverse and sprawling. It's an occasion to philosophize, and to sing along with John and other masters of the Big Tent genre.
Our July crash course in Americana, in MTSU’s Master of Liberal Arts (MALA) program, officially commences Tuesday. But I realize that my entire lifetime (which began when Eisenhower was president and many people of un-admitted privilege thought America was nothing but great) has been instructing me, for better and worse, in this subject. So what have I learned?
Hard to summarize. The word seems to evoke, for most, a nostalgic and sentimental feeling that conjures Norman Rockwell-ish images of a romanticized past. It implies a time when we imagine things to have been simpler and people to have been kinder, gentler, less politically polarized, more mutually supportive, eager to transcend rather than double down on our differences. Free from acrimony, anxiety, want…
But there’s another side to it, of course, as the artist also depicted:
One of the problems we live with these days, in addition to the nation’s perennial problem of racism and an only-nominal commitment to democracy for all, is a refusal by too many Americans (in lockstep with their demagogic populist politicians who want to make us “great again”) to acknowledge the dark side of our own national history; and to take concerted steps, through the procedures and protocols of institutional and aspirational democracy, to overcome the nation’s legacy of discrimination and exclusion.
I’ve learned that our American philosophical tradition has resources that can help.
It’s a multiply-rooted tradition, anchored in the pragmatic and pluralistic meliorism of William James and John Dewey, in the naturalistic and individualistic transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, in the communitarian idealism of Josiah Royce, in the “animal faith” materialism of George Santayana, in the Stoic Pragmatism of my mentor John Lachs, in the audacious intrepidity and can do-ism of families like the Bloods, in the literary genius of our greatest writers (my contemporary favorites are the Richards, Ford and Powers), and in so many other sources we’ll just have time to begin noticing in this quick course.
Our primary textual guides will be the late John McDermott (Streams of American Experience: reflections on the history and philosophy of American culture), Doug Anderson (Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture), and Carlin Romano (America the Philosophical).
If I’d known of it in time, I’d have made John Kaag’s new book American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation the centerpiece.
And if we had more time, I’d revisit my old course and its eponymous classic text Democracy in America.
But, time being our greatest and most elusive commodity, we’ll do what we can with the resources at hand.
And we’ll begin with the Americana genre of music they play on our campus radio station that first inspired me to think about offering this course. In that domain too, our subject sprawls in multiple directions, reflects diverse influences, and cannot be pinned down precisely.
That’s precisely why I like it.
It ain’t hurtin’ nobody, ain’t hurtin’ no one.*
*It being the music, and the act of reflecting intelligently on America’s impact on philosophy, culture, and the world. That impact itself has undoubtedly been a mixed bag of hurt and help. That’s why we should study it, learn from it, act from our learning, help more, hurt less.