Rome and America

"This Roman polish, and this smooth behaviour, That render man thus tractable and tame? Are they not only to disguise our passions, To set our looks at variance with our thoughts, To check the starts and sallies of the soul, And break off all its commerce with the tongue; In short, to change us into other creatures, Than what our nature and the gods designed us? (Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, I, 4, 40-47) What have we been changed into? Amidst Rome's civil war, the Numidian general, Syphax, questions the effects of Romanization endorsed by Numa, the prince of Numidia and ally of Cato the Younger in the fight against Caesar. This question is unsettling in part because answering it begins to undermine an assumption about the past upon which the question rests. The more one pushes the question, the more one realizes that there is no absolute beginning point, no from, but only ongoing experiences and memories that almost imperceptibly connect to identities. Yet cultures attempt to answer the question of identity definitively. Cultures naturalize, lending normativity to beliefs and actions that form identity. And cultures narrativize, giving constancy to identity over time. The assumptions that underlie these narratives - the symbolic resources that a culture draws on - rest in the background as something already familiar within which one remembers, makes sense of experiences, and forms 12 expectations. To ask about these assumptions unsettles, laying bare the anxieties that underlie the question, "Who are We?" We answer the question for America through familiar European categories that grow out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Questions of the American founding are organized around debates about its republican, liberal, or religious heritage. The space, itself, appears as an empty state of nature in which a new history (absent a feudal past) can begin. Belonging appears as a formal feature of the integrated nation-state (notably, citizenship) that is comprised of constitutional rights and sustained by market interactions. And the future is envisioned as a narrative of progress of reason, science, wealth, and rights. Early American social actors and observers defined it this way; scholars analyze America in these terms"--