15 - America’s Scientific, Cultural, and Sociopo litical Landscape 1

Summary

America lives, I would say, under the sign of three “religions”: one is that of a population without academic studies, the second is the predominantly scientific and progressive ideology of the universities, and the third is democracy, which reflects on the first two and with which it is closely interconnected.

In terms of religion strictly, America's population lives as countless denominations and sects, one of them being that of Christian science. These denominations and sects are not divided by theological disputes, but by ethical understanding, as the great writer George Bernard Shaw put it. Hence the spirit of tolerance and mutual understanding which characterizes them. Hence also the spirit of Christian love toward those less fortunate, who are constantly helped by numerous charitable contributions.

In virtue of the same wide tolerance issuing from their shared interest in social ethics, not theological discussions, university churches are not simply exponents of their denominations but also exponents of other denominations and sects, which also have their own students, no matter how few.

The university church also hosts science conferences with a large audience, larger than fits in the university amphitheaters. The lecture held by Professor Eddington from Cambridge University on the expansion of the universe was attended in the University of Chicago church by over three thousand people.

Even more impressive is the democratic mutual understanding in scientific debates in universities. With its pragmatic spirit, American science does not emphasize the theories that divide it, but the methodology that unites it. In Contemporary German Psychology I analyzed over fifteen different schools. America had a single school, Watson's behaviorism. It lost its adepts quickly, and most psychologists started studying extrospective behavior, completed by the introspective study of the conscious and unconscious promoted by German psychology, especially psychoanalysis. After Hitler came to power, the United States was the preferred destination for adepts of psychoanalysis, both of Semitic origin and of Aryan origin, as they said in those unfortunate times. In virtue of this inclination toward empirical, fact-based research methodology, America was only divided on the great issues, and was not divided by schools. Schools in psychology, sociology, economics, and sociocultural anthropology were left to Europe, which afterward—under the shadow of American methodology, which it borrowed—started to disappear from the Old Continent.