ON PATIENCE AS AN AMERICAN VIRTUE

THE war in Viet Nam is teaching the U.S. many things, among them a lesson in patience. Limited but growing American involvement, beginning with President Kennedy's increase in military advisers in 1961, has already lasted longer than U.S. participation in World Wars I and II. Yet the prospect is that any solution, military or political, is still some years off. "Patience is the one virtue the Communists have in greater abundance than the non-Communists," said President Johnson at the Hawaii conference. "We are going to have to show them that we have learned our lesson."

Viet Nam is not the only situation that calls for national patience. Everywhere, from Charles de Gaulle's chauvinist challenge to the latest mob pulling down an American flag, the world relentlessly tests American forbearance. Equally so at home. The urgency of the young, the struggle for Negro rights, the plans for the Great Society, the space race -all raise expectations of quick success to balance against the need for measured progress. The ability to find the right pace and the steady strength for the long pull are more necessary than ever. Yet there is, and always has been, a widespread feeling that the U.S. lacks these qualities.

"We are not a patient people," says Hubert Humphrey and most of the world agrees. Americans are seen-and see themselves-as restless and driven. New skyscrapers go up at the drop of a mortgage and are torn down almost as fast. Cars, houses, jobs and spouses are changed with an ease and rapidity that shocks the rest of the world. There is the ten-city tour of Europe in two weeks, the stand-up lunch, the precooked frozen dinner, the disposable dress, the phone call instead of a letter, the formal invitation sent by telegram. There is even, for some, instant bliss through LSD. The U.S. is running an economic fever trying to end poverty and pollution, put a man on the moon and end the war in Viet Nam all at once. Is this bad? Social Ethics Professor Roger L. Shinn of Union Theological Seminary thinks that it "makes us unfortunately Faustian and more than a bit sophomoric."

Three Revolutions

Psychology and anthropology are inclined to see America as a nation of spoiled children. "Americans want immediate satisfaction," says Manhattan Psychologist Harold Greenwald. "The car buyer can't wait a week for his car." Says Manhattan Psychoanalyst Sandor Lorand: "Patience is just another quality Americans forfeit when they live in this pressure cooker. From the day the child starts school, he is under pressure. No wonder he grows up impatient-first with others, then with himself."

Abroad, the most common charge against the U.S. is that it is impetuous, trigger-happy, and always looking for quick, easy solutions. President Johnson's recent peace offensive, sending a squad of envoys zinging around the world, was widely considered too high-pressure. On the other hand, many are all for American impatience. "Cows are patient, but I never thought of Americans as bovine," says Adman David Ogilvy. "The Russians are patient-they like their movies six hours long. The French are patient-they spend five hours preparing their meals. Patience is for peasants."

Whether Americans are criticized or praised for their supposed lack of patience, the basic assumption is probably wrong-just another of those monumental cliches about the U.S. character that clutter the intellectual landscape. While Job is not exactly a national hero, there is every evidence that-below the surface-Americans are an exceptionally patient people, and becoming more so.

The early church fathers would have examined Adman Ogilvy carefully for horns and a cloven hoof if they had heard his contemptuous put-down of patience, a paramount Christian virtue. St. Paul rated it a "fruit of the spirit" and St. Augustine called it "the companion of wisdom." Saints had it: the ultimate in provocation is proverbially "enough to try the patience of a saint." Sinners had it not: they complained and lamented. The Jews waited as patiently as they could for the Messiah and the Lord's Kingdom that would right all earthly wrongs. The Moslems told one another that patience was "the key to Paradise" and "a gift that Allah gives only to those he loves." Patience, in short, was the core of religion in a world where life was hard, society was static and hope lay in the hereafter. Patience meant resignation-a necessary quality for tillers of the soil and fishers of the sea, whose control over what happened to them was marginal. In such a frustrating scheme of things, outbursts of personal rage must have been no small social problem. The Ship of Fools, a 15th century compilation of doggerel homiletics by a German satirist named Sebastian Brant, warns that

Plato too suppressed his rage And Socrates, for they were sage. Impatience born of irritation May lead to sin and dire damnation.

The dawn of science and the rise of the merchant middle class changed the very meaning of patience. Observing, recording, experimenting-patiently piling their slow-baked bricks of knowledge into steps leading upward toward freedom and control of nature-the pioneers of science began to give patience a positive ring, a means to hope within the here and now. At the same time, the capitalists, gradually replacing the aristocracy at the top of society, were demonstrating what the patient, longview investment and reinvestment of money could do to liberate men from the conditions they were born to. Patience was no longer quiet resignation but purposeful action toward a long-range goal.

The subsequent series of revolutions that shaped the modern world show an instructive pattern of contrast. The French Revolution-like the French themselves-was wildly impatient. Utopia was to be now. built on the flaming brain of Reason and the decapitated corpses of the misguided opposition. The Russian Revolution was another Utopia supposed to rise from blood and blueprints, though it looked to a longer time and more corpses before the socialist Eden would be achieved, and counseled strategic patience in following the drive of history.

The American Revolution was something else again. It was free of that special form of impatience-oversimplified ideology. Never had such forbearance and such a talent for political compromise been demanded of a body politic as the power-wary, pragmatic Founding Fathers required of the citizens of the United States of America. The U.S. Constitution is the great document of patience-with-a-purpose. It has inevitably helped mold the national character of the Americans who serve it-and whom it serves.

Those who cut their roots in Europe, and those in America who pulled up stakes to push West, were not merely restless and dissatisfied. In a new kind of environment, for which nothing had prepared them, they staked their lives on a future that might bear fruit only for their children. The chronicles tell of countless men and women who were far from impetuous and headlong, farther still from resigned, as they pushed their creaking wagon trains over mountains and across blazing deserts-forced back by Indians, or sickness, or starvation, but gathering strength again to return and press on.

Turning the pioneers' trading posts into towns, and the towns into cities, worked the same strain deeper into the American character. Fast-buck operators flourished, the rapid turnover and the quick profit were the dreams of many a businessman. But the more typical pattern for 19th century business and industry was the narrowed eye with the long view, the reinvested profit, the McGuffey and Horatio Alger mottoes on the mind:

Go Slow and Sure, and prosper then you must With Fame and Fortune, while you Try and Trust.

Americans no longer live in a McGuffey world. The patterns of patience and impatience are apt to be paradoxical. A businessman may want to rush to California in five hours and yet wait patiently for a delayed jet takeoff. A scientist may bolt instant coffee at a hurried breakfast and then spend a day of slow, painstaking research in his laboratory. Americans love speed and power on the highway, but they are the most disciplined drivers in the world. While the French, Italian or German driver burns out his batteries with his horn and uses his car as an instrument of vengeance ("In Germany," says one psychoanalyst, "anger is a status symbol"), the American knows that he must drive as part of a group. Although Americans endure queues, bad service, inept repairmen, and surly sales help with remarkable stoicism, French Philosopher Jacques Maritain once suggested that they are impatient with life itself. Yet almost everyone has to learn patience in a complex modern society characterized by the growing interdependence between men and the growing reliance on brittle machines.

Restrained Power

The noisy, protesting young appear more impatient than ever. They don't seem to want to wait for anything-going steady, or a better world. And yet the ever-lengthening educational process represents a major test of patience. Education is simply another form of what sociologists call "deferred gratification." When it comes to love, Americans of any age seem far less ready to defer gratification. Protracted courtship or drawn-out seduction never seems to have appealed to the American male, for whom Stendhal's celebrated ten-year wait to achieve success with the wife of a Milan shopkeeper ("On Sept. 21 at half-past eleven," the novelist noted in his journal, "I won the victory I had so long desired") might appear something of a waste of time. American lovers are usually accused not only of wanting to win but of not exploiting their victories patiently enough-perhaps in part misguided by Kinsey, who equated rapid-fire lovemaking with superior virility. But lately a whole library of sex manuals has been telling the American male that he must be patient-and he may be paying attention.

As in love, so in war. The American reputation for wanting quick victories is deserved, from John Paul Jones ("boldness, not caution, wins") to Sherman and Patton. Yet in every war they have fought, Americans have also shown great patience, which of course is a form of courage. For all their dash, U.S. generals appreciate slow, painstaking preparation and careful strategy in the tradition of Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator ("The Delayer"). After Pearl Harbor, when Admiral Chester Nimitz was rebuilding the US. Navy, he invariably fended off action-hungry critics with the Hawaiian phrase Hoomana wa nui (Be patient).

It is probably in the fields of science and business that American patience is most familiar. The folk hero of American tinkerers remains Thomas A. Edison, who prescribed "stick-to-itiveness" as one of the prime requisites for achievement. More sophisticated researchers have kept alive the tradition of the patient scientist. Luther Burbank spent 16 years developing an edible cactus for cattle, and during his experiments, by his own estimate, had a million spines painfully pierce his skin. Dr. Selman A. Waksman and his researchers spent four years analyzing 100,000 soil microorganisms before isolating streptomycin. Today, the legendary, lonely experimenter is increasingly giving way to teams working on a variety of crash projects under the "systems approach." Not only team work but the computer is drastically hurrying the pace. But this does not do away with patience; it simply frees it from drudgery and turns it to creative tasks.

As for business, it is more than ever before a matter of long-term projection and growth rather than of quick profits. "It generally takes plain, simple, unappetizing patience to achieve a business goal," says Manhattan Stockbroker Armand G. Erpf. "The overnight fortune is a myth." Business leaders are notably patient. The typical top executive has been with his company for 25 years and worked up through the ranks. Salesmanship is also becoming an ever more complicated exercise in patience, supported by huge amounts of research and strategy; it is not unusual for a salesman to work years to land a new account, and some look back on decade-long campaigns.

The growing importance of labor-management relations has also put a premium on patience. It is perhaps significant that an expert in the field, Professor of Management Douglas V. Brown of M.I.T., who thinks that Americans are impatient generally, maintains that in labor relations they are more patient than any other people.

What of the world? Usual accusations to the contrary, the U.S. has been more spectacularly patient in its foreign relations since World War II than any other great power in history. Through billions of dollars of foreign aid and a generation of troops stationed in Europe and Korea, through the Berlin and Cuban crises, through endless haggles with Russia, through millions of words at the U.N., through wearisome ego-salving for scores of tiny new nations, through insults from foes, obstruction from allies, envy from all sides, the U.S. has shown incredible self-control. Under the most extreme provocation, the U.S. maintained links with Indonesia and Ghana, thereby strengthening the anti-Communist forces that in recent weeks moved against Sukarno and Nkrumah. Personifying the U.S. posture in the world are the airmen of SAC flying their long patrols around the globe, the sailors of the U.S. nuclear submarines cruising for months in the service of immense, but immensely restrained power.

The "Why" Questions

Obviously Americans have their impatient streak. They distrust patience when it seems only to mask indecision or lack of initiative, the kind of patience that Psychiatrist Eric Berne (Games People Play) has in mind when he says: "Most people spend their life waiting for Santa Claus or death." Americans occasionally admire but basically fail to understand the legendary Oriental patience, which is based on a religious view that sees existence as an inescapable treadmill. In fact, Asians themselves are impatiently copying Western civilization, and they are beginning to recognize that what is seen as patience is often merely resignation to a lack of alternatives.

It is not true, as Aldous Huxley said, that for Western man waiting is tortur-only waiting without a goal in sight. "It is not that we are an impatient people but that we are a highly moralistic people," says Harvard Sociologist Seymour Lipset. "In a conflict we tend to feel strongly that there is a wrong and a right, and something must be done. Essentially, this is Protestant thinking." Adds Italian Author Luigi Barzini: "What makes an American different from most other people is the certainty that all problems in life, like those in a good math textbook, can be solved. Another is the certainty that each man is responsible for his own success. Both these beliefs are often sadly contradicted by reality. The American's reaction is to double his efforts-work longer hours, invest more money, put more men on the job, and try to make up for lost time. His impatience is the proof of his optimism."

Insofar as the pressures and problems of the world create technological challenges, there need be no concern about America's sticking it out. Nor is there any reason to think that Americans cannot face the psychological challenge of danger, disappointment and hostility. Says the State Department's Walt Rostow: "We can out-patience anybody if we want to." But in order to do so, the U.S. must see a goal to its patience, not simply a goal in a specific situation like Viet Nam but an overall purpose. In short, it will need answers not only to the pragmatic "how" questions, but to the philosophical "why" questions. These will demand the patience of Job. But Job's patience-boils and all-was not resignation but striving persistence. Despite his wife's admonition to "curse God, and die," despite the elaborate rationalizations of his philosopher friends, Job persisted, and persisted in demanding an answer from God himself-putting his suffering on the line for it. And he got the answer.

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