ALEX CHADWICK, host:
Sometime soon, a baby will be born or a border will be crossed and America will have inhabitant number 300 million. If there still is some kind of idea of what it means to be an American, how does that idea change when there are 300 million of us? Here is NPR's Mike Pesca.
MIKE PESCA: A few years ago, Gallup conducted a poll where they found that 89 percent of American's believed that the moon landings did in fact actually happen - an overwhelming majority, Gallup noted. But here's another way of looking at this. Even though 6 percent called it a hoax and 5 percent said they'd like to see a little more information, when you add those two digits together, it means there are 33 million Americans who aren't buying this whole moon landing story. That's about the entire population of Canada. Three hundred million is a lot of people. So much that any time someone says Americans stand for this or Americans believe that, there are millions and millions of Americans who totally disagree. Anthony Appiah, Princeton professor and the author of The Ethics of Identity, harkens back to Aristotle, who believed that democracy had its limits - physical limits, in fact.
Professor ANTHONY APPIAH (Philosophy, Princeton; Author): Aristotle thought that a political community had to be small enough that if you got together and somebody said something, everybody could hear it. Now we've solved that problem to some extent because we have telephones and televisions and radios, so the audience can be pretty big. But, of course, as the audience gets bigger, the proportion of the audience that has a chance to speak gets smaller. Part of Aristotle's thought wasn't just that you could hear what anybody said, but that anybody could speak. And in our kind of democracy, that's just not true.
PESCA: Now technology does exist so that more people can speak through things called blogs or through fairly inexpensive equipment which lets lay citizens make videos to be sold on TV stations like Current, which almost no one watches or put on websites like YouTube so that almost no one can download it. This is part of the well-examined trend of mass culture giving way to niche culture. In the American of, say, 1967, the year the 200 million mark was crossed, mass culture looked like this to a young boy named Robert Thompson.
Professor ROBERT THOMPSON (Director, Center for the Study of Popular Television, Syracuse University): I would turn on the TV one night and there would be a State of the Union address, which I had no interest in whatsoever as a kid. I'd turn the channel, and there'd be the State of the Union address. I'd turn the channel again, and there would be the State of the Union address. So by accident, I watched the State of the Union address. I got a civic education of sorts. Back then, we were all forced into this big middle. And by all being forced into a big middle, we were forced to sometimes encounter ideas and notions that we didn't already agree with.
PESCA: Thompson, who grew up to be the director for the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, says today there is a channel or blog for every political persuasion, so you only have to encounter ideas you already agree with.
Prof. THOMPSON: I don't think we yet realize how much we are going to miss that oligopolistic, dominant cultural glue that we all had back then. I think the big cultural story of the 21st century is how a nation this big and this diverse is going to manage to survive culturally without any of this stuff that used to hold us all together, because it's really going away.
PESCA: We're going to manage just fine, says Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason Magazine.
Mr. NICK GILLESPIE (Editor, Reason Magazine): It means is that people are freer than ever to pursue their individual desires, their individual goals. And people are more comfortable with that.
PESCA: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was a phrase that defined the American dream back when there were only 2.5 million fairly homogeneous Americans living in the 13 colonies. Gillespie says that dream is easier to pursue today for 300 million diverse Americans.
Mr. GILLESPIE: I think that's what binds us together is the very fact of our difference. We have created an America - we have created an operating system that is allowing more and more kind of personal applications to be run. And this is a great thing.
PESCA: Over time, different definitions of what it means to be American have waxed and waned. There have been periods of great religiosity and then decline. The ideal of rugged individualism has done battle with the idea of collectivism. But as the population grows, the emphasis on tolerance has grown with it. After all, 300 million are a lot of people to make accommodation with. Even those 30 million who don't buy the moon landing. Or, to be tolerant, the 270 million people wearing blinders who do.
Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
