The New America and The Old Europe

Though I don't agree at all with some of the things it says, I'll post some extracts from a very interesting article called Utopia Achieved, by Chris Richardson, on the meaning of American way of life and how Europe's dreams could only be shaped in the New World:

For the European, America represents something akin to exile, a phantasy of emigration and, therefore, a form of interiorization of his or her own culture. (...) The whole foundation of America is a response to this dual operation of a deepening of the moral law in individual consciences, a radicalization of the utopian demand which was always that of the sects, and the immediate materialization of that utopia in work, custom and way of life. (...) This material utopia of the way of life, where success and action are seen as profound illustrations of the moral law, was crystallised by exile and emigration and these have, in a sense, transformed it into a primal scene.

(...) America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present. (...) America has no identity problem. (...) The US is utopia achieved. (...) The emergence of these societies (US) at the margins deprives the historical societies of their (EU) destinies. The brutal extrapolation of their essence across the seas means that they lose control of their development. (...) Their vision of the world will always be beyond our grasp, just as the transcendental, historical Weltanschauung of Europe will always be beyond the Americans. (...)

History and Marxism are like fine wines and haute cuisine: they do not really cross the ocean, in spite of the many impressive attempts that have been made to adapt them to new surroundings. This is just a revenge for the fact that we Europeans have never really been able to domesticate modernity, which also refuses to cross the ocean, though in the other direction. There are products which cannot be imported or exported. That is our loss... and theirs.

(...) We are still at the centre, but at the centre of the Old World. They who were a marginal transcendence of that Old World are today its new, eccentric centre. Eccentricity is stamped on their birth certificate. We shall never be able to excentre or decentre ourselves in the same way. We shall therefore never be mnodern in the proper sense of the term. And we shall never enjoy the same freedom -not the formal freedom we take for granted, but the concrete, flexible functional, active freedom we see at work in American institutions and in the head of each citizen. Our conception of freedom will never be able to rival their spatial, mobile conception, which derives from the fact that at a certain point they freed themselves from that historical centrality.

(...) Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology. Here in America only what is produced or manifested hsa meaning; for us in Europe only what can be thought or concealed has meaning.

(...) Admittedly, the irony of community is missing here, as is the playfulness of social life. The charm to be found in social graces and in the theatre of social relations is all transferred outwards into the advertising of life and lifestyles. This is a society that is endlessly concerned to vindicate itself, perpetually seeking to justify its own existence. Everything has to be made public: what you are worth, what you earn, how you live -there is no place here for interplay a subtler nature. The society's 'look' is a self-publicizing one.

(...) Salvation no longer has to do with the divine or the State, but with the ideal form of practical organization. Is this to be traced back to the secularization of conscience effected by Protestantism, to the introjection of divine jurisdiction into daily discipline?