Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character

Amateurs are more likely to see what is actually there because there’s no money, no power, no prestige (at least not immediately) attached to seeing anything else. Amateurs mainly just want to know.

There is no fixed American meta-narrative, but there is this ebb and flow between Adamsian veneration of piety and Franklinian love of improvisation, between Calvinist certainty and Deist doubt, between head and heart, virtuocracy and meritocracy, good character and cunning action, between security and freedom, between professionalism and amateuris

One thing that marks the amateur, the best of them, is this talent for not seeing things according to the dominant paradigm.

If you look at the history of professionalization of any kind, you’ll see that it tends to follow this route. In America and Europe, a great deal of professionalization occurred in the nineteenth century, when most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossi

he’s always looking at birds he’s seen a thousand times as if he’s seeing them for the first time. That’s a skill born of love, amateurism in the best sense. It’s an obsession, the kind that makes you drift off into the woods in college, so consumed with the unutterable pleasure of the work that you forget, ultimately, about earning a degree.

Like any invasive species, amateurs gather where there has been some kind of stress to the system, some kind of disturbance. When they clump together by forming a group of websites or a weekend club, it reveals something about where the inventive surges in a culture are located.

But these are just the characteristics of people obsessed with a new idea, following their bliss, in love (amo, amas, amat—amateur) with one true thing.

The adventure’s the thing, of course, but it’s always nice when a self-made pioneer winds up with, say, a genius grant—something that happens all the time in our culture. We’re Americans. We love that stuff. This is our temple and our American idol.

Amateurism is often about reclaiming some kind of primordial authenticity.