United States: What’s to like and not like?

At the end of her moving post on torture that I referred to earlier, Emma of Late Night Thoughts says:

If Americans are to be believed, America is a nation with a special dispensation from God. The shining city upon a hill, an example to all of what is best in mankind. We cannot make that claim and at the same time discard our principles whenever it suits us. If our guiding principle is to be that the ends justify the means, we must admit that we are as all other nations, an occurrence of history and chance. It is not a dishonorable thing to be, but is it what we want to become?

That passage reminds of things I was surprised to find in the US when I came here. One was this idea of the US being a special place; in fact the idea that the US and its people are chosen by God to be the best ones in this universe. This idea has some religious underpinnings but is essentially secular in the US. I found it really odd. The only other contexts in which I have heard or read about “the chosen people of God” is from Muslims (basically in the sense that Muslims are the only ones that will do well on the day of judgment, an idea that’s common to many religions) and from Bible literalists (who consider the Israelites, Jewish people in other words, to be the chosen tribes or something) as well as from anti-semitic conspiracy theorist nut-cases (especially Muslim ones) who twist the idea of the Bible literalists and some verses from the Quran to think of Jews as the chosen people who defied God and were kind of chosen as an example of punishment.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the US is a pretty good place. It has a much better human rights record in recent history than most other countries. It has an open immigration policy, both at the governmental level and at how immigrants are welcomed and accepted by the natives, which is much better than any country in Europe (the only other country with a really good immigration policy is Canada in my opinion). It has a Constitution that guarantees our civil liberties, rule of law and democracy. The educational opportunities (at the university level since that’s what I am familiar with) and the economic opportunities are second to none. It is a huge country with a lot of differences in scenery. One could spend all one’s lifetime vacations within the borders of the US. In the more than 5 years that I have been here, I have visited or passed through 36 states missing mostly the midwestern states. Two cities I would love to live are New York and San Francisco.

But I do not understand the idea of the “chosen people/country”. It sounds like a “holier-than-thou” attitude. It is ridiculous. It engenders the attitudes that we see in this administration. This is the sort of idea that results in those stupid boycotts of the French that are happening nowadays. It’s the sort of attitude that I have seen sometimes in good pious religious people in Pakistan that made me hate them.

Talking of religion, I was extremely surprised to find out that people in the US were religious. This was not something I knew before coming here. My idea of the US was the sort of post-Christian society that most of western Europe is nowadays. In this respect, the US is more like Africa and Asia (excluding northeast Asia) than like western Europe.

Another interesting characteristic of people in the US is anti-intellectualism. It makes the society egalitarian in an interesting fashion. But it also is against the meritocracy that we South Asians and East Asians are raised on. Plus being a person who has spent a lot of time and effort on education for myself, I just can’t reconcile with the anti-intellectualism. This trait also probably means that we are more likely to elect Presidents like George Bush than some policy wonks. In fact, wonk, nerd, etc, do seem to have negative connotations in popular usage.