Hamid is part of a huge crowd of observers, both domestic and foreign, that has tried over the course of centuries to understand America. This exercise has most often landed them so far outside the ballpark they're in the parking lot. Undaunted, they proceed to extract meaning from their understanding of what a parking lot looks like. This has been the case for Shadi Hamid, who wonders whether a perceived decline in religious faith in America has been funneled into politics.
I don't mean to shortchange Hamid's contemplations but I think a genuinely helpful discussion about American politics and religion should start with an understanding of what America is actually all about.
A fast way to get Hamid and The Atlantic's editors in the ballpark is the story of the Iraqi engineer who was frantic because the U.S. bombing of Baghdad had put a critical facility out of commission. There was no hope of obtaining parts to get it running again anytime soon. I don't remember whether the American military officer sent to help him had an engineering background, but he looked at the situation then told the Iraqi (paraphrasing here), 'Okay, let's see what we can do with duct tape and wire.'
If the Iraqi believed that all Americans were batshit crazy, the suggestion would've confirmed it for him. But he went along and helped the American scrounge parts from other bombed-out facilities.
Then, between the two of them, and with lots of trial and error and liberal use of wire and duct tape, they got the parts fitted together and fired up the facility. Keeping it going required constant tinkering, and I don't think it worked terribly well but it wasn't working well even before the bombing.
And there you have it; there are countless kinds of hearts but the soul of America is a tinkering fool.
For various reasons our soul is not immediately evident, or maybe it's so evident it's hidden in plain sight. But when you consider the peoples who left everything behind to settle in America, they are and always have been marked by incredible resourcefulness and the improvisational spirit that manifests in tinkering and the do-it-yourself mentality.
That's come to be the real divide in American society. On one side are people who were never prompted to do things for themselves and were sold on the idea that success meant getting others to do things for them. On the other side, people who measure success in the ability to do things for themselves.
Those who want others to do things for them have been in the ascendant in recent years but that's because the complexities of modern society in the USA have stymied the creation of action paths sufficient to deal with the present era. The upshot has been a kind of social gridlock resulting in large numbers of Americans who take out their frustrations by calling each other bad names.
The gridlock masks the fact that doing it yourself doesn't necessarily mean thinking it up for yourself. The American and Iraqi who engineered the restoration of a facility were following a model, what they knew certain parts should do when fitted together. There are prodigies who can figure out from scratch how to do something, but most of us need a model, an action path to follow, a set of instructions, before doing something new for ourselves.
So that's where we are today in the USA: waiting on the path makers to tinker routes through the new complexities. The path makers are around, as I pointed out years ago on this blog. Now it's just a matter of waiting for their work to come to the fore. Then we'll see where the situation that so concerns Shadi Hamid really stands.
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