The age of America and our reluctance to evolve

Does anyone think that our relatively youthful status as a nation has something to do with our collective lack of overall progressive values?

Maybe I'm being naively optimistic but perhaps the recent turmoil our nation is going through should be looked at as a phase of "growing pains" that will eventually turn into a much more mature and evolved society?

I mean, compared with Europe and even the Middle-East and Japan, this nation is pretty young and as a result in my opinion, immature. Religious fundamentalism, hardline individualism, disrespect for community, institutionalized racism and prejudice, etc. - basically the national equivalent to a bunch of sniveling teenagers/young adults.

I don't really know what to conclude from this but this was a positive thought on the future that made me feel a little less dispair from the day-to-day events we're all immersed in.

Opinions are appreciated.

I do think that it's beyond time for the US to get past the racism and slavery aspects of the psyche. And yes, there is still institutional slavery. Most of it is pursued on someone else's soil, but it's still there. That's the main reason for the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

with the original puritan settlers. They came here to flee the heretical enlightenment happening in Europe, and set up a perfect Christian society over here. They believed this would bring about the second coming. The rw neocon wackos we see today are following this same cultish pattern. Most of the country evolved a more mature spiritual view, whether a more moderate Christianity, a different religion altogether, or an absolute secularism. It's a big part of why the founding fathers took care to separate church and state. They were enlightened men of science. Somehow today's neocon throwbacks, who think people lived with dinosaurs, have attained the power to have the biggest impact on our politicians, and the voting public.

Puritan values definitely aren't extinct yet.

but the overall trend is always toward progressive thought.

It doesn't have a direction, it doesn't have an endpoint. I'm not sure how you can be more evolved then something else.

You're born, you grow, you mature, then die. It's a constant cycle. If we are in a growing pain, then we're that much closer to dying.

Stick that in your positive thought pipe and smoke it :toast:

However, we're that much closer to starting the cycle over again. Look at that any way you want.

Although, looking at it from another way, this global civilization has really only started. On the other hand, everything happens much quicker these days.

Yin and yang I suppose.

Our culture is but a reservoir of cultures. We have all the cultures of the world here.
We're as old as any of them. Just so, all the other cultures of the world have changed
in equal degrees.

We're all of a similar vintage -- anything else is just Alpha jockeying for position.

There is definitely a different, for lack of a better word, zeitgeist going on here in the USA compared to older European nations for example.

My family is Italian in heritage and my grandfather was a first generation immigrant to the U.S.

Though I am only second generation American, I have no knowledge of what it was like to live in Italy nor do I have any conception of the values that permeate that nation today or in the past.

I'm an American through and through and therefore experience the world through my country and it's young, burgeoning values.

Language, etc, is largely superficial.

There really isn't any such thing as an "American" as one distinct entity except in the most general sense. There are southwesterners and southerners and New Englanders and midwesterners, etc, etc. My family in the US south was deeply and distinctly different from my own family in California.

There are European countries younger than our own. What makes them different? Nothing. The US is as old a block of culture as any in Europe. The labels we put on ourselves are immaterial. There are negative elements in Europe equal to those we have in the US.

Incidentally, the base of our legal system is English Common Law -- a very old thing itself. lol

in areas inhabited for thousands of years before America.

Often times discarded and forgotten.

..as far as the Middle East and parts of Asia are concerned. Infant girls are not smothered to death at birth (well, not very often- and not because they are girls); there is no enforced dress code for women (not in mainstream society, anyway); people are open to worship any way they want, or not at all, or even openly criticize those who do worship.
Our cultural heritage is many centuries old, not simply 231 years old. Our political process, however is quite young (but pretty old compared to almost any other nation's).

You may be on to something here.

:dem:

That's why the US is more socially conservative then Europe. We were also a frontier society for a long time, which gave American society a distinctly Libertarian and somewhat anti-intellectual flavor.