"We have…got no way of thinking about things." This assertion of uncertainty was addressed to John Steinbeck in the 1930s by a New England farmer whom the Nobel Prize winner chanced to meet in his now-famous travels with his dog, Charlie. Steinbeck had set out to take the pulse of America, to determine firsthand the though patterns and behavior of Americans at a time when basic values seemed to be in flux.
Undoubtedly, World War II held in abeyance tendencies in American intellectual and cultural life that had been forming since the early decades of the twentieth century. When "normalcy" returned in the fifties and early sixties, many were led to systematic reflection on American mores. Philosophers, historians, sociologists, and theologians, aware that much had changed, began the descriptive and evaluative task of determining what, in fact, was taking place. Daniel Bell would speak of a "watershed" and a "disjunction of realms" in which moral, economic, political, and cultural ideals and activities had lost their former coherence.
This month's theme, "In Search of American Character," reexamines some of the classic texts that have explored how American character has changed and why.
Surveying industrial America in the 1950s, William Whyte in The Organization Man described the corporate mentality of the postwar era as a threat to American character. But, as Michael Maccoby points out, if Whyte's analysis were true, "How could some American companies be so innovative if they were full of conformists. Who designed and sold new computers?" Maccoby concludes "the experience of the corporation was by no means totally negative." While people feel intellectually stimulated by work, the problem, Maccoby says, is the emotional void they feel in the workplace.
The compelling thirst of our culture for goods, sensations, and enervating comforts ironically is met by the same modes of production, marketing, and advertising that sustain our economy. Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism asserted by the 1970s that "American capitalism…[had] undercut the Protestant ethic which provided the moral foundation for the society." According to David Gress' evaluation, too may people have deluded themselves that the Reagan revolution turned things around, that he got things going again. In fact, he says, "In the area of culture and identity, which is even more important than economy, the tide has not been turned."
In another seminal work, We Hold These Truths (1960), John Courtney Murray articulated a "public philosophy" based on "the American proposition" that would serve as a basis for consensus. For Murray "the ethic which launched Western constitutionalism…has now ceased to sustain the structure…of this constitutional commonwealth." Although Murray was not optimistic that the West could recover its patrimony, Jude Dougherty writes, he would be even less optimistic today because, in Dougherty's view, the fragmentation of American society has grown worse.
Christopher Lasch explains that his book The Culture of Narcissim (1979), was misinterpreted as a book about the "me decade." It grew out of a study of the American family, which had been steadily declining. In fact, he says, "The book was an attempt to explore the psychological dimension of long-term shifts in the structure of cultural authority." He found that
...
Read Full Article
|
