American Culture—From the Perspective of Automobile [6]
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-17编辑:黄丽樱点击率:19292
论文字数:4674论文编号:org200904171514028474语种:英语 English地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:American Automobilethe United StatesCulture美国汽车美国文化
ds and punishes. Each person is important to him. The Christian God is a personal God, who desires a relationship with his creation. In a culture that values individualism, Christianity is perhaps the perfect religion.
B. Pursuit of Change
Americans are so fond of cars. There is another important reason, because the Americans believe in changes, like change, and respect change. With cars, Americans can succeed in changing the working place from one city to another in a short time. As Gu Ning reminds,“ Change, newness, and progress are all highly valued.”(Gu Ning. 1999:15) From changing their personalities with assistance of self-help gurus to changing where they live at a faster rate than any other people in the world, they are not satisfied with the status. Nor have they ever. "Early Americans cleared forests, drained swamps, and altered the course of rivers in order to build the country. Contemporary Americans have gone to the moon in part to prove they could do so.” The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville(1998), after visiting the United States over a hundred years ago, reaches much the same conclusion when he wrote that the people in the United States" all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, and humanity as a cha nging scene.” From the culture's earliest establishment as distinct national entity, there has been a diffuse constellation of beliefs and attitudes that may be called the cult of progress. These beliefs and attitudes produce a certain mind-set and a wide range of behavior patterns. Various aspects of this orientation are optimism, receptivity to change, emphasis on the future rather than the past or present, faith in an ability to control all phases of strong conviction in change an progress in how Americans view the environment, Gu Ning (1999) offered a summary of this point:” This belief also has fostered a use of force in interactions with the environment and other people that is evident in phrases such as taming the wilderness, winning the West and conquering space.
Each new generation in the United States wants its opportunity to be part of that change. So strong is the belief in progress and change that Americans seldom fear taking chances. The writer Henry Miller clearly captures this American spirit,“ Whatever changes in life, some are not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying blind urge.” (Miller, Henry.1996:13) Many older and more traditional cultures, which have witnessed civilizations rise and fall and believe in fatalism, do not sanctify change, progress, and daring and often have difficulty understanding the way American behave. As Gu Ning notes:“This fundamental American belief in progress and a better future contrasts sharply with the fatalistic (Americans are likely to use that term with a negative
or critical connotation) attitude that characterizes people from may other cultures, notably Latin, Asian and Arab, where there is a pronounced reverence for the past. In those cultures the future is considered to be in the hands of fate, God, or at least the few powerful people or families that dominate the society. The idea that they could somehow shape their own future seems naive or even arrogant."(Gu Ning.1999:35)
C. Humor of Americans
The automobile took one kind of epoch-making modern industry product, from the
birth, had been entrusted with humanity's values, the life shape, the emotion demand and so on, and refracted the different time, the different crowd's
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