Testing

So it's another Fourth of July, marking 245 years of "the American Experiment." The idea of the United States as an experiment is a common one. And, like a number of common ideas, it means different things to different people, and so has lost a more generalized, broadly understood definition.

According to Merriam-Webster online, an experiment is "an operation or procedure carried out under controlled conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law, to test or establish a hypothesis, or to illustrate a known law." It's understood that there's nothing "controlled" about any of this, but that still leaves the second half of the definition, namely, what is "the American Experiment" intended to inform us of?

I get the impression that for many people, the United States illustrates a known law. People look at the country and find in it confirmation of what they want to understand about themselves and their place in the world, whether that's the idea that "hard work and playing by the rules leads to success" or "wealth and power run the world at the expense of the masses." And as happens from time to time, even in more formal scientific research, there is a tendency to pick and choose from the available evidence in the service of supporting one's chosen conclusion.

And this is an obstacle to the United States simply being a place. A fairly large chunk of real estate with people on it. People who, really, aren't much, if any, different from people in any other part of the world. They respond to many of the same incentives, and have many of the same goals. Casting the nation as an experiment freights it with something to prove, whether that's something that people already believe they know, or something new and different. Either way, I don't know that it can live up to that, or even if it should live up to that.