It was around December 2020 when I had decided to read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I had not read a book in years and missed that old childhood feeling of getting lost in a book, in an adventure. This seemed like a story that would interest me seeing I love jazz and roadtrips. It didn’t take long for me to lose myself again and immediately I was in love. I loved his writing, the music, the people, and, above all, the places. Kerouac so perfectly captured the American 50s in a style that flawlessly mimics the way our minds work. It was his explorations and reflections on America that really stood out to me. He so masterfully captured the painful beauty of America through people, music, and nature. He obviously saw something special and endearing in Americans and he couldn’t shake it and neither could I. Writers, like Kerouac, who have used literature to capture America have disappeared from the mainstream and left a hole in our culture that we have failed to fill. Americans are failing to preserve American beauty through literature and are suffering for it. We need rebellious writers who are willing to step up to the plate and deliver what Americans, whether we realize it or not, are desperately craving.
Our elites and ruling class like for us to think that America is an idea, something not tangible. What is this even supposed to mean? They tell us our nation’s founding was based on the false notion that all humans are born equal, that everyone is just as capable as the next. This idea of a nation is gross and appalling. The notion that America is an idea ignores everything else that went into establishing and maintaining this nation such as religion and geography. The problem is people eat this up. It tickles their ears. Once the masses accept this, as they have, the lack of standards and progress becomes all too common as this very notion relies on the precept that there is no place for neither standard nor progress in the American ethic. This is only one example of Americans struggling to define America. We have always been in a constant cycle of trying to define this nation and its people. We try to define it in political and economical terms and tend to not push the meaning any further than that. We say it’s a republic or a democracy or whatever and then go from there. There have been many attempts to define Americans by their role in the operation of the nation. This is an inherently flawed approach as any attempt to define the nation before the people fails. The nation is made up of its people, after all. Any attempt to view the people through the nation’s functions or purpose. We must view the nation through the people. The end goal has always been to define what is American, not America. Instead of defining America before the American, let’s derive America by first discovering the American. Instead of speaking in political and economic terms first, let’s speak in terms of morality, virtue, and character. We will never come to define our American morals by speaking of virtue secondarily.
The American should attempt to discover American morality through literature. Few mediums can display and explore morality and virtue like literature can. This is partially why we read to children. We read them stories that exalt and define some virtue that any decent human should have in hopes they learn the moral of the story. This does not change with age. It becomes more complex but it does not change. Morality becomes seemingly more complicated as we age and our brains develop and thus the literature becomes more complicated. Regardless, developing and exploring morality is still a primary object of literature and it always has been. This is why it is crucial for anyone to read literature. Great pieces of literature contain moral truths that are essential to the preservation of the human. More importantly, great pieces of literature are so influential that they can permanently change us on an elemental level, change us to the point we may never be the same again. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, more powerful than being fundamentally changed by a great piece of literature. This is why it is important to explore virtues and morality through literature. We ought to read literature for its beauty and there is nothing more beautiful than pure and true morality and virtue. Nothing is more powerful and moving than that which is beautiful and America is overflowing with beauty.
As Americans, it is our duty to attend to the preservation of our morality through literature. We must do away with the notion that morality and virtue are purely subjective in order to truly discover Americanism in literature. Set aside the notion that we are pure individuals, severed from the collective. Individuality is crucial but so is unity within the collective. Too strong of an emphasis on individuality has diminished the perceived value of a collective unity. Truth is not subjective to our own worldview. If it were, it wouldn’t be truth. Americans have become programmed to only understand themselves as an individual first and an American second. This has bred a breed of individualism so radical that it has become hard to fathom being states united again. It has become American to not identify with America. This is a great misstep. We must want to be Americans first and individuals second. There have to be those characteristics and actions that we deem right and those we deem wrong, as a collective. Then there has to be a set of virtuous characteristics and actions that are distinctly American and take priority in our culture. We must constantly seek to identify these exhibitions of objective American morality in American literature. We may understand the Irishman through Joyce and Dostoevsky masterfully preserved his Russian experience. The same must be true for the American. There must be something so uniquely American in great American literature, something American about its experience. This is what we ought to be looking for in literature. The characteristics and actions that, when pieced together, describe the American and his experience, the morality in American triumph and American suffering. This American beauty has sadly become lost in much modern American literature.
This is where our publishing industry has failed. Most American novels being published today are a reflection of a society that has embraced complacency and crippling pacifism and has shunned young men and convinced them their masculinity is a parasite. They have convinced these young men that they have nothing of value to offer the world and that they must check their masculinity before doing anything at all. The overwhelming majority of modern American fiction consists of young adult books that have been watered down to the point that there is hardly anything special or unique about them. They lack anything of substance. The exodus of young men from fiction writing was a grave misstep of which we are now suffering the consequences. Losing the men means losing the boys. It should be no wonder why they don’t want to participate in a world where they aren’t wanted or welcomed. Now, there are hardly any more men to write the stories that young boys need to read. This is only a reflection of a deeper cause. The polarity between femininity and masculinity is being ostracized from modern American culture and morality has gone with it. Beauty has gone with it. Nothing in its place remains. Recovering truly beautiful American literature then means holding fast to this polarity, this most natural order in the bones of being. Preserve this order. Exalt this order. Things might then begin falling into place.
As a culture, we ought to praise literature by American writers who uphold American morality and continue the American literary tradition ourselves. We also ought to write great American literature. Is it our right to complain about the lack of great new American authors if we aren’t trying to write great American literature ourselves? This is how we must continue the preservation of what is truly American. The problem is that doing this is dangerously dissident. Truth makes us uncomfortable and we live in a world designed for comfort and immediate happiness. Automation and computerization is making our country more and more idle. Truth and its uncomfortability is becoming more and more foreign to each generation. Our elites perpetuate sin and immorality through any medium they can. Immorality has become a proud way of life for many. This has ultimately created a culture of weakness. Maintaining virtue and morality requires those who are willing dissenters. It also requires the support of those who aren’t willing to become dissident. If someone doesn’t stand up for American values, then they will be lost. We must continue to write and read great American literature that upholds the morality and virtue that is distinctly American. We must utilize literature to push back against our culture of comfort and immediacy with testaments of challenge, adventure, and hard-work. American culture is quickly becoming more and more insufferably vapid of truth and morality. It’s time we kick it into gear and change it. We can talk about it all we want but our talk means nothing if we don’t do. Literature is humanity’s most powerful tool. It’s time we act like it.