Watching the Empire Move on

April 10, 2009

LETTER FROM AMERICA

Watching the Empire Move On

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS -- The woman reached for my ticket. I had entered the parking lot two hours and a few minutes earlier. The first two hours were free, but I had stepped just across the line into paying territory. Would she let it slide?

She appeared East African; I am an American who lives in India; I imagined that she and I might have a shared sense of the situation. I was just a few minutes over, and in our Old Countries I might have been waved through with a flexible shrug.

But not here, not in America, where there are rules to bring human caprice under control. She asked for $2, and I paid, with a feeling of sadness at the coldness of our interaction and yet also a sense of admiration for the great human accomplishment -- the invention of patterns that apply to everyone always, not selectively and sometimes -- behind that coldness.

You notice things when you come home. I grew up in America but have been living for nearly six years in India. I returned home this time in a storm of terrible words: crisis, downturn, recession. And what struck me about the gloom, coming from overseas, is that it is both deeper and shallower than most Americans think.

The crisis seems deeper because it is not, at least to these foreign-returned eyes, simply a matter of subprime mortgages and credit-default swaps and A.I.G. and Ponzi schemers.

It can seem a natural outgrowth of a way of life that jars one upon landing in America: an entire society induced to want more and more, to consume more than they earn, more than 1,000 beings elsewhere might consume; a society that has invented, for $4, a ''skinny hazelnut latte'' but has diminished the odds of the guests in the coffeehouse speaking to another human being rather than to their laptops; an obsession with perpetual movement that sometimes drowns out the question, ''Why are we doing this?''

But as I drank America in, I also could not help but feel that the crisis was shallower than Americans think: that America, which has spread these woes to the world, has special powers to escape them, powers that the countries it has infected may lack: powers of regeneration and reinvention.

Diversity is not normal. Most people in most places live and work with people who look like them, eat what they eat, share their sense of right and wrong. Back in India, even today, if you pluck two names out of the phone book, chances are that they would not be able to dine together: different notions of pollution and purity, vegetarian and nonvegetarian; different assessments of each other's level of humanness.

But, from Washington to Brooklyn to Boston, it struck me again and again how American faces don't match. They mouth different languages. They live in a thousand idiosyncratic styles. And, exposed to so many others' idiosyncrasies, they cross-pollinate and invent.

Then there is the power of creative destruction. There must always be something better, a new new thing to replace the old new thing. It is a political system that alienates the world by making an enemy called Hussein and then pivots to elect a president called Hussein.

And there is the power of democracy: not the democracy of casting a vote at regular intervals, but the democracy that weaves into everyday human interactions, a culture in which no one is thought to be better than anyone else, in which the idea of a taboo against ''commoners'' touching a queen is strange.

It is coffee shops where you bus your own cups. Important officials who drive themselves to work alone, not with phalanxes of needless hangers-on around them. A ceaseless flurry of ''thank you'' and ''please,'' which sound to foreign-returning ears like pro forma phrases, but which suggest a concern about taking people for granted, about assuming that anyone owes you anything simply because of their rank and yours.

The American superstructure is burning down. But the foundation, of diversity, creative destruction, democracy -- these things live on and will, one imagines, underpin a revival before long.

I worry far more for the developing world, for places like India, which has been mimicking the American superstructure without building an equivalent foundation, pursuing the effect without the cause.

India seems, on the surface, to have arrived. There are the requisite global luxury boutiques; restaurants that serve sophisticated food in tiny portions with something called coulis drizzled across the plate; Indian firms that make multibillion-dollar acquisitions; software companies that write code for the world; songs that win Oscars and hearts many thousands of miles away.

But perhaps it has all come too quickly, and served to crowd out the hard slog of constructing a modern society in more than name alone. Yes, India has Louis Vuitton, but how easy is it to be gay there? Yes, its companies have dazzled the world, but why do their workers complain still about the hierarchical, soul-draining work culture? Yes, it won an Olympic gold medal last year, but why has it been so hard to recast servants as people paid, not born, to serve?

Success is distracting, and it distracts one, above all, from failures. And so the result in India is a revolution that feels borrowed, without all the preceding layers on which to stand.

Today in America a whole way of life is crumbling. But, just as fast, new visions are taking hold. New notions of permissible state intervention in the economy; a new questioning of the culture of debt. As an old superstructure withers, the robust foundation seems ready to birth the eternally improbable new.

But in India, to which I will soon return, one fears that the society will succumb yet again to the empire's joke. Empires bring an alien way of life to a land; and then they leave and move on. But the colonized, cut off from the source of their own behavior, keep repeating the old patterns, which is why Indians still say ''cantonment'' and ''alight,'' long after most Britons have ceased and desisted.

Will it be the same this time around, with the arduous pupil converted to the Washington Consensus way of life in the very hour that that consensus crumbles, without the capacity to invent the next way of life, with nothing to go on but someone else's time-worn ideas?