The Many Ways of Being Modern

Thirty years ago, my girlfriend and I took an overnight ferry from Piraeus, the port of Athens, to Iraklion, on the island of Crete. After mooching around the Minoan ruins at Knossos, we hitchhiked to the wildly beautiful lands in the west of the island. The girlfriend became my wife, and every year or two since—15 times in all—we've returned, to the same village, the same indescribable light, the same White Mountains plunging into the same wine-dark sea.

I wrote that we return "to the same village," but, of course, over a generation, its physical and social structure has changed utterly. The village is now a suburb of the local town. Dirt tracks through the olive groves have become paved roads. Not long ago, it was a minor scandal when a girl student, back for the summer, walked around in a T shirt and cutoff jeans; now local girls sunbathe in thong bikinis. What we first encountered as a peasant society, whose rhythms were agricultural and ritualistic, has become a wholly modern one.

I've been thinking about the village since the Bush Administration's decision to accelerate handing over sovereignty to a new Iraqi government. For here's the thing about western Crete: it has become modern, but it hasn't become American. I don't simply mean that the obvious appurtenances of American life—fast food, SUVs, baseball, whatever—are absent, though they are. More important, American ideas, American heroes, American dreams are missing too. For many Cretans, for example, there is something incomprehensible about the U.S. President. "George Bush," one old friend said to me last summer, "is always photographed next to soldiers. Why?"

Over the next few years, Iraq will similarly define modernity in its own terms and at its own pace. It will have a constitution—but not one like the U.S. Constitution, for it seems likely that the Iraqi document will recognize a special place for Islam in national life. Iraq will have modern state institutions, but they will not have a monopoly of legitimacy. For years, loyalty to the state will coexist with that owed to kin and tribe.

There is nothing particularly surprising in this, but the sense of being modern without being American can be unsettling. Americans like to think that they have defined the modern world, for better and worse. Some Americans blame the U.S. for the woes of our age, from global warming to the rapacity of huge corporations. Others see American ideals—a commitment to freedom, say, or to limited government—as being universally inspiring. "America," said U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sept. 11 this year, "is truly the light of liberty and the hope of the world."

But the claim for the global centrality of the American experience, good or bad, is arrogant and out of date. The U.S., for example, was once unique in the way that it had made a single nation out of emigrants from everywhere else. But now every great city is an immigrant city. You don't have to go to New York City, as once you did, to find the shock of a happy Babel; you can enjoy it just as easily in London, Toronto, Hamburg or Sydney. Mass tourism, which has been the most important modernizing force in the world for the past 20 years, is hardly an American phenomenon at all. It is European tourists, not Americans, who have transformed every place with a beach from Thailand to Tunisia.

The distinguishing feature of America's claim to epitomize modernity is not that it is true but that it is made. Americans use their history, from the Mayflower to Martin Luther King Jr., to fashion a narrative that they imagine is an inspiration to all those outside their shores. No one else can do this or has shown much inclination to try. At the height of Japan's economic power in the late 1980s, few Japanese ever claimed that they had discovered a set of eternal truths of universal application. In any case, what would the texts of Japanese modernity have been — The instructions for a karaoke machine? Europeans, too, lack the inspiring symbols with which American history is littered. The Prisoners' Chorus from Fidelio is no match for the Declaration of Independence.

But however attractive they may seem to be, American ideals can't be rammed down others' throats. The Bush Administration's aim to create democracies in the Islamic world is a noble one, but it will fail if the sole measure of its success is the extent to which those in Muslim lands eventually look like Americans. Not everyone wants Big Macs, 200 TV channels and the separation of church and state. Nations are capable of finding their own paths to modernity. That will be as true in Iraq as it has been in a village in the shadow of the White Mountains of western Crete. Americans need to get used to it.