The Ritual of American Consensus

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 10, No. 3, Winter 1979 The Ritual of American Consensus Sacvan Bercovitch I discovered America in 1968. By then, I had been living in the United States for a few years; but that was a different matter. As Elizabeth Peabody, the transcendentalist, said, after she walked into a tree : "I saw it, but I did not quite realize it." Ten years ago, I realized that I was living inside the myth of America. Not of North America, for the myth stopped short at the Canadian and Mexican borders, but of a country that despite its arbitrary frontiers, despite its bewildering mix of race and creed, could believe in something called the true America, and could invest that patent fiction with all the moral and emotional appeal of a religious symbol. I felt then like Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes. Here was the Jewish anarchist, Paul Goodman, berating the Mid-West for abandoning the dream; here, the descendant of American slaves, Martin Luther King, denouncing injustice as a violation of the American Way; here, an endless debate about national destiny, full of rage and faith, conservatives scavenging for un-Americans, New Left historians recalling the country to its sacred mission. Their problem was not what is usually called identity. They never asked "Who are we?" but—as though deliberately avoiding that commonsense question—"When is our errand to be fulfilled? How long, O Lord, how long?" And their answers invariably joined celebration and lament in reaffirming America's mission. No one at Su- George Williams College had prepared me for that spectacle. 272 Sac van Bercovitch I say this gratefully, to acknowledge the benefits of cultural shock in American Studies. It gave me something of an anthropologist's sense of wonder at the symbols of the tribe. Mexico may have been the land of gold, and Canada might be the Dominion of the North; but America was a venture in exegesis. One was supposed to discover it as a believer unveils scripture. America's meaning was implicit in its destiny, and its destiny was manifest to all who had the grace to discover its meaning. To a Canadian sceptic, a gentile in God's Country, it made for a breathtaking scene: a pluralistic, pragmatic people openly living in a dream, bound together by an ideological consensus unmatched by that of any other modern society. Let me repeat that mundane term : ideological consensus. For it was not the myth I discovered in '68. That, I had heard about, at Sir George, in a course on Emerson. What I discovered was the day-by-day uses of myth. It was a hundred sects and factions, each apparently different from the others, yet all celebrating the same mission; a vast Pequod's-crzw of selfdeclared isolatoes, joined together in a deafening concordia discors. Ideology in this sense is a narrower term than myth, but perhaps a more helpful one. Myth may clothe history in transcendent metaphors, but as Elizabeth Peabody learned, the metaphors gain substance from their relation to facts. They teflect and affect a particular set of needs, and they persist through their capacity to help people act in history. And though the consensus I speak of is not a measure of what census-takers call society—though it may mask social realities—nonetheless it denotes something equally "real": a system of values, symbols, and beliefs, and a mode of socialization designed to keep the system going. So, it seemed to me, the rhetoric of mission served ten years ago. What was lost in that endless debate about America, I realized, was the fact that the debate itself was part of a longripened ritual of consensus. And in trying to make sense of my discovery, I found myself back in the rhetoric of the ante-bellum North. It was there that the consensus established itself; there the rituals of God's Country were completed and sanctified. What I offer here is an outsider's common-sense guide through that visionary terrain. My subject is ritual in its broadest sense—the forms and strategies through which a culture justifies its ways and seeks to...