Missing: The vision thing. - Review - book review

Commonweal, May 19, 2000 by Eugene McCarraher

The spiritual fatigue that haunts America's current prosperity is the chief occasion for these books on hope. We are witnessing, they argue, the death of an American capacity for social hope: the withering of passion for what the populists once called a "cooperative commonwealth," the erosion of any willingness to envision a community that is more just, more free, and even beloved.

Clear away the gargantuan material abundance of our time, our authors suggest, and you find a hopeless spiritual condition. As Andrew Delbanco puts it in The Real American Dream, Americans find it increasingly hard to conjure up "any conception of a common destiny worth tears, sacrifice, and maybe even death." In its utopian quest for a free global market, capital has done more than gag unions, repeal regulations, and mock restrictions on accumulation and consumption. The world of money has worn down the power of imaginative resistance. The hope for a beloved community, now consigned to that lotus-bin called "the sixties," gives way to the hipness that is the official culture of infotainment capitalism.

The dilapidation of our social and political hope is evident everywhere. Delbanco documents the relentless privatization of middle-class life, "the impoverishment of our children's capacity to imagine the future," and the corporate colonization of our leisure and fantasy. Roberto Unger and Cornel West note the political disenchantment of college youth and the conceptual bankruptcy of a North Atlantic Left. And Richard Rorty--whose work has been vilified by the Left and the Right as an apologia for amorality and insouciance--writes of our Second Gilded Age with eloquent outrage. "The fact that people are now willing to cross picket lines, and are unwilling to ask who makes their clothes or picks their vegetables, is a symptom of moral decline," he asserts in Philosophy and Social Hope. Like an urbane and secular Jonathan Edwards, Rorty sermonizes that the nation once heralded as the container of multitudes, the "vanguard of a global egalitarian utopia," is "in danger of losing its soul."

It is to save the nation's soul that the authors seek out American traditions of social progress for inspiration and extension. Delbanco's intellectual and moral authority grows out of his work on the Puritans and especially The Death of Satan (1996), one of the finest accounts of evil and its vicissitudes in American culture. Shifting his sight here from sin to redemption, Delbanco sets out to interpret "the real American dream," a spiritual ideal gradually obscured by a consumerist facsimile. Delbanco's "meditation"--one he concedes is a story of hope's "diminution"--follows the American quest for self-realization through "God," "Nation," and "Self." In the first phase, exemplified by the Puritans, hope for the self lay in what one divine called "a holy despair in ourselves" that led, through humility, submission, and love of neighbor to transcendence in God. This Christian conception could not, however, survive the solvents of wealth and the blows of the Enlightenment, and by the nineteenth century a new narrative of hope, forged in Revolutionary nationalism and constructed around the ideal of "citizenship in a sacred union," had partially supplanted the religious account.

This civic republican ideal of "nation" animated Tocqueville, Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Lincoln, all of whom believed that the possibilities of the self could be realized in an expansive and energetic democracy. But in the process of inspiring economic development and political reform, national aspirations also revealed a lethal ruthlessness. Melville's work especially unveiled "the dirty little secret of the new national religion--the fact that the ebullient democracy was also a killing machine." The ideal of "nation" that galvanized Progressivism, the New Deal, and the Great Society could also sanction slavery, racial segregation, and the imperialism that slaughtered Native Americans, Filipinos, and Vietnamese.

In recent decades the American quest for self turned increasingly inward. Though Delbanco's history gets pretty facile at this point, the key culprits in the current narcissism seem to be consumerism and the erosion of faith in public institutions occasioned by the Vietnam War. Unwilling to end his meditation on so downbeat a note, Delbanco hastens to observe that "the most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence," and that "Christianity and civil religion," though weakened, "remain the bedrock of our culture."

Delbanco's God is thoroughly Protestant and even more thoroughly Puritan, as are his models (Edwards, Winthrop) of religious cultural criticism. By persisting in the Protestant parochialism that still deforms American intellectual history, Delbanco, like Christopher Lasch in The True and Only Heaven (1991), limits the intellectual and imaginative resources on which we could draw for social hope. Likewise, Delbanco's Emersonian watch seems all too aestheticized and reminiscent of postwar liberal intellectual culture, where the gray-flanneled gravitas of a Reinhold Niebuhr did more to paralyze than electrify social hope.