America the... ?

O beautiful for spacious skies/For amber waves of grain/For purple mountain majesties/Above the fruited plain!/America! America!."

How many Duke students today feel comfortable uttering--let alone believe in--these words? Many Duke liberals, to generalize, seem to see the world in shades of gray, intoxicated by cultural relativism. Many Duke conservatives, on the other hand, seem to see the world in treasury green, convinced that America is just one more player in the global free market. Many others in between, it appears, don't seem to care at all.

It is unclear, that is, that our generation of Americans values and actively defends any American or Western political traditions-democracy, capitalism, due process for citizens, freedom of speech--as superior to other ones--theocracy, communism, martial law, press censorship, to name a few. Someone will soon ask: Is this a bad thing? But if such a framework is wrong, what comparison are we to make between a society where free expression of religion is legally protected, such as ours, and one, like Iran, where it is not? What about between a society where protesters are free to demonstrate against the policies of their own country, such as ours, and one where democracy activists are sentenced to imprisonment, like Burma-where Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has spent most of the last 17 years under house arrest?

As Yale historian Donald Kagan writes of today's students, ".I find that a firm belief in traditional values is rare.. Our society is judged not against the experience of human societies in other times and places, but against the Kingdom of Heaven. There is great danger in this, for our society, no less than others now and in the past, requires the allegiance and devotion of its citizens if it is to defend itself and make progress toward a better life."

As many a late-night commons room discussion demonstrated for me, many students at Duke seem unable to distinguish between blind patriotism, based solely on the fact of one's birth in a particular country, and informed nationalism, based on a comparative examination of one's nation's performance among a reasonable, if arbitrary, set of criteria--the ability of citizens to protest, assemble peaceably, pursue a chosen livelihood and the like. Because we are inherently incapable of generating a perfect list of universal human desires, many students reject the concept of an imperfect one outright. But logically this cannot be the end of the argument--for if all nations are equally incapable of comparison, why do so many Duke students seem to scorn the United States in particular?

The novelty of taking what was once a controversial position--and one now popular among professors, who happen to give grades--seems to be one motivation for lambasting America. But more substantially, it seems that many Duke students, unwilling to measure the United States against other countries, measure it against itself. That is to say, these students seem to believe that the many failings of our own nation--the annihilation of Native American tribes, the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, support for dictators in Arab nations, the arrogance singeing American foreign diplomacy--mitigate, or even obviate, American accomplishments. This argument, which really returns to nihilism, seems an utterly unrealistic and disproportionate basis for judgment. I challenge anyone at Duke to identify a nation whose proportion of freedoms protected to freedoms deprived--for both its own people and the world, no less--exceeds that of the United States.

But the tradition perhaps most imperiled at Duke is the American Dream itself: that, because we are a nation of laws rather than men, evaluating one another not by race and sex but by the merits of our actions, we may succeed even in the greatest adversity. Duke--along with the rest of the academic establishment--now propounds the notion that only straight white males are allowed to partake in this dream. Departments and programs devoted to the study of a single race, sex or sexual orientation seem to fuel this incredible cynicism by perceiving history, literature and economics through such a restrictive lens. Students, meanwhile, complain incessantly about the Areas of Knowledge, Modes of Inquiry, and other curriculum requirements without realizing how critical a common understanding of our shared heritage is to its future.

Defending America has not been popular in colleges for a long time. Perhaps with affluence supplanting faith, Duke students can afford not to believe in their nation. But our world cannot.