Conflicting Value Systems: The Paradox at the Heart of the American Dream
In the United States we pride ourselves on being a society that is capable of assimilating and including people of all ethnic groups, cultural or religious backgrounds, beliefs, or value systems. The reason is that the founding fathers of this great nation had a deep and inspired vision, a vision of multicultural and multi-ethnic inclusion, a vision of all humanity working together for a brighter future, free from the bonds of political tyranny. or religious persecution or ethnic discrimination.
However, the important thing to keep in mind is that the vision of the Founding Fathers, a vision that gives us the remarkable documents that are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States– it was a vision that was rooted in a specific value system that they shared and agreed to. Namely, a value system that values freedom, inclusion, religious tolerance, multiculturalism, that is, the “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and, as stated in the Pledge of Allegiance, “with liberty and justice for all.”
The assumption here is that other people, the people we want to assimilate into the union, share this vision and this value system.
But what if they don’t? What if people who seek to be assimilated or included believe in some form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism that seeks to deny the rights and freedoms of others while imposing their own value system on them? What if they turn out to be, for the sake of argument, religious authoritarians or fanatics or anarchists or advocates of totalitarianism or believers in chaos and mob rule? What if they engage in discriminatory practices or political witch hunts? What if they practice cannibalism, human sacrifice, or other criminal activities?
Surely, by including those people in our union, we undermine the vision of the Founding Fathers. By including authoritarians or fanatics in our society, we help make our society a little more authoritarian and intolerant. By inviting tyrants or anarchists into our midst, we contribute to making our society a little more tyrannical or chaotic, as the case may be. By giving credit to those who do not share our values, we undermine the value system at the center of the United States Constitution, the vision of the Founding Fathers – that is, the vision of equality, life, liberty, and justice for all.
However, what is the cost of excluding these people from our union? By excluding those we deem unfit for inclusion, those whom we regard as not sharing our vision or our value system, are we, in fact, guilty of undermining our own vision of universal inclusion and freedom from within? Do we become authoritarian and bigoted ourselves when we seek to protect our vision of inclusion and freedom from other authoritarians and bigots (or, rather, from those we consider authoritarian and bigots)? Are we imposing our value system on others when we seek to protect our values of inclusion and acceptance from those who seek to impose their value system on us?
This scenario is repeated all too often in American history, since the Salem witch hunts in the 1690s, in pre-revolutionary America, when more than a hundred innocents were indicted and arrested, and several of them, executed on grounds of suspicion resulting from mass hysteria over witchcraft; to the Red Scare and the McCarthy trials of the 1940s and 1950s, when thousands of American citizens were blacklisted, arrested, and executed on unsubstantiated, and often unfounded, suspicions of sympathizing with the Communists; all the way to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 hardline policies, when the administration felt compelled to resort to policies like pre-emptive military invasion, pre-trial detention and imprisonment and even torture and wiretapping without court order, all for national security reasons: the watchword in such cases is presumably “prevention is better than cure.”
But before condemning those whose actions we find unpleasant, we must honestly consider whether, under the same circumstances, any of us would have acted differently. How many of us are really so noble and self-sacrificing that we would put the national interest and the values and vision of the Founding Fathers above personal interest and the expediency or advancement of our own careers, even at the expense of our parents’ lives? ? others?
I guess that’s the basic paradox at the heart of the American Dream: Sometimes the cost of defending that dream from those who would seek to undermine or destroy it is so great that we end up undermining and destroying the dream ourselves. But perhaps it is better to have a vision, even if one does not measure up to it, than to have no vision at all.
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