In Praise of Licentiousness

For some time now, I’ve been engaged in a running debate about the American Identity with some very smart thinkers on the topic, such as Paul Cella. One recent thread on Redstate.com led to a seeming consensus that the American identity, whatever else it may be, is nebulous and difficult to pin down. Another thread goes into more detail trying to define “American culture” that is worth reading.

I’ve been thinking about this topic for pretty much my entire conscious life. What is an American? What are the characteristics of Americanness?

I have a working hypothesis now:

Americanness is licentiousness.

That’s a different way of saying freedom, but the emphasis, I think, is useful. The dictionary definition of “licentious” is:

li·cen·tious

1. sexually unrestrained; lascivious; libertine; lewd.
2. unrestrained by law or general morality; lawless; immoral.
3. going beyond customary or proper bounds or limits; disregarding rules.

It is the third definition I find most interesting.

We often talk about freedom as being the ability to do things that others don’t approve of. Hence, Voltaire’s famous quote: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” The First Amendment is based almost entirely on this idea. Other nations and other cultures, clearly, have such ideas of freedom as well. But the United States, I submit, is unique.

In American culture, there is no difference between licentiousness and freedom, because there is no “customary or proper bounds or limits” that would distinguish between them.

The original thirteen English colonies may have shared a common culture in terms of “customary or proper bounds or limits”, but even they had very different views on issues such as slavery and attitudes towards nobility between slaveowning, genteel South and the free, industrial North. One gets the sense from the Bill of Rights prohibition against establishment of religion that perhaps the clergymen from Massachusetts and the humanists from Virginia may have differed sharply on what is “customary and proper” as pertains to religion and government.

And whatever the origins of the Union may have been, over the course of its history, the influx of different cultural viewpoints — Irish Catholics, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Jews, Chinese, and others — meant that there really was no “shared customary or proper bounds or limits” in what evolved as American culture. Courtship rituals may be dramatically different between Puritans in Rhode Island and the Irish in New York — what one culture considered proper bounds may have been seen as lewd or prudish by the other. Certainly, the distinctively American culture that arose amongst the slave population had wholly different customary or proper bounds or limits than that which might have been predominant in the white population.

In the arts, what distinguishes American arts is that very lack of respect for customary or proper bounds or limits. For example, American music was not tied down to paying homage to custom of a particular musical tradition, and ended up going in hundreds of different directions, mixing and blending influences from Methodist hymns to African chants to music of the frontier to come up with jazz, blues, rock and roll, rap, and disco. Even as more “unitary” cultures like China and Japan have maintained traditions such as Chinese opera or Noh drama, Americans are constantly looking for the new, the shocking, the thing that transcends the customary or proper bounds or limits of good musical taste.

Even in literature, the most American of contributions to the millenia-old tradition of poetry is free verse. Talk about violating the customary bounds of poetry.

Unlike the older traditions and cultures of Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, the American mindset is firmly set on the idea of measuring an individual by his or her own merits. Not so in older, more clan-based cultures. For example, Koreans may look deeply at a young man’s parentage, grandparents, uncles, aunts, extended family to determine his worth as a bridegroom. Americans just ask if he’s an honest, hardworking, solid guy. Social mobility in America — in violation of customary or proper bounds or limits — is unlike anywhere else in the world.

We speak of the self-made man; no other culture does — except as homage to American ideals of meritocracy, born from both the frontier spirit and the lack of a common shared societal understanding amongst its peoples.

I recall as a young man, whenever I was rude or uppity, my parents would refer to that as “being American”. Korean culture values age-based hierarchy immensely, and the idea of a son talking back to his father would have been shocking to the conscience. They called that “being American”. Licentiousness. Freedom as licentiousness.

Even in such minor things as dress, the distinction came up from time to time. My mother might say that a certain girl was “dressing too American” meaning she was exposing too much flesh. The conservative Confucian-influence moral mindset of the Korean would think a young woman exposing her shoulders in public is improper. So even in her own mind, as an immigrant slowly (oh, ever so slowly) becoming Americanized, she thought of restraint and modesty as “Korean” and brazenness as “American”. And yet, the average American wouldn’t have thought twice about a young woman wearing a tanktop in the summer. Freedom as licentiousness. Accepting elements that transcend “customary or proper bounds or limits” because we do not have a common understanding of such customs, such traditions.

Of all of the nations, and more importantly of all of the cultures, only American culture has such widespread acceptance of licentiousness.  Other cultures might look at an innovation in social practices as a violation of mores and social norms; Americans tend to celebrate such license.

I do not claim that this is the end of the discussion — indeed, I see it as only the beginning of exploring what makes a particular thing “American”.  My sense is that the inchoate characteristic is bound up with “freedom” — but freedom of a certain kind.  A transgressive freedom, if you will, that recognizes no customary or proper boundary because of a lack of agreement on customs and propriety between the many groups and people who make up American society and history.

But they all agree, it seems, in some idea of transgressive freedom.

-TS