Missing: The vision thing. - Review - book review

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.

In contrast to Delbanco, Unger and West (Harvard professors and renowned social theorists and political activists) want more action. Noting shrewdly that hope is "more the consequence of action than its cause," and appealing to what they call the American "religion of possibility"--an abiding triune faith in democracy, practicality, and the power of individuals to improve their lives--they offer guidelines for a refurbishment of the progressive tradition born in the first decades of this century. Among their sweeping but sensible proposals are: full public financing of campaigns (a more thorough reconstruction than the timid McCain-Feingold reforms); "social endowment accounts" on which individuals could draw for education, housing, or entrepreneurial ventures; and the reorganization of Social Security into a social investment fund.

By describing as "religion" the practical and experimental ways in which Americans approach technology and personal relations, Unger and West highlight the mixture of prophecy and wonkery that has been the glory and the bane of the progressive tradition. They marvel at "a worldwide network of productive vanguards," at "flexibility" and "decentralization" in labor markets and production, and at the "flattened hierarchies," "fluid job definitions," and "constant reshaping of products, services, and practices" that characterize the advanced sectors of contemporary capitalism. But The Future of American Progressivism seems unaware of the ways this lexicon articulates the libertarian elitism of the "productive vanguards."

Of course flexibility, decentralization, and egalitarianism are virtues, not vices. But what sort of "deep democracy" is it (West has a habit of falling for all things "deep") that allows a handful of Wunderkinder, however "socially conscious," to determine how "fluid" and "flexible" the rest of us will be? For a couple of leftists, the authors are remarkably forgetful of the market's coercive character. If the market is to be "democratized," shouldn't the resources now monopolized by the lap-topocracy be the property of all?

Rorty apparently thinks so, and that lends his own reflections on hope a freshness lacking in the others. Blending Delbanco's national ideal with the utopianism of nineteenth-century Europe--"the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record"--Rorty's social hope both outshines Delbanco's melancholia and quickens the blood more readily than the decaffeinated progressivism of Unger and West. If Delbanco, Unger, and West offer Americans either smoldering embers or a cut of the profits, Rorty wants them to have it all: the "worker ownership" and "union control of the workplace" ideals of anarchism and syndicalism; the "industrial democracy" and "guild socialism" of the 1910s; the "self-management" demands of 1968, as well as other decentralist roads not taken.

To achieve these utopian hopes, Rorty calls for a revitalized American Left that speaks loudly about the malefactors of great wealth, wages unashamed class warfare, and revives the romance of faith in human possibility, under what he calls "civil religion." In both of his books, Rorty excoriates the academic Left for its immersion in the exotic pedantry of postmodernism, its marination in the "identity politics" of race, sexuality, and gender, its eschewal of class politics, and its contempt for patriotism. "You can feel shame over your country's behavior," he writes in Philosophy and Social Hope, "only to the extent to which you feel it is your country. If we fail in national hope, we shall no longer even try to change our ways."

Still, while Rorty argues that this leftist patriotism will eventually "achieve our country" (a phrase he borrows from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time), his putative popular front of democratic bards (Walt Whitman), pragmatist philosophers (John Dewey and William James), and the labor-union movement isn't always the radically democratic vista he imagines. Rorty contends that solutions to economic, population, and ecological problems will require "top-down, technobureaucratic initiatives," an assertion he illustrates infelicitously with China's one-child-per-family policy. Rorty's benevolent technocrats sound a lot like Unger and West's productive vanguards. Neither his nor theirs can be counted on to welcome decentralized workers' control.

Rorty's description of his labor-left nationalism as a "civic religion" points to the religious concerns that animate his social hope. Not that Rorty would see it that way. In Achieving Our Country, he identifies sin with "self-loathing," while in Philosophy and Social Hope he complains that belief in otherworldly salvation releases Christians from this-worldly efforts to alleviate suffering. These are ridiculous misrepresentations, and the maternal grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch ought to know better. But Rorty atones with some uncharacteristically sympathetic observations about Christianity that all of us should take to heart. In a wonderful essay titled "Looking Backwards from the Year 2096," he cheers that the "social-gospel theology of the early twentieth century has been rediscovered." He sees (without a trace of awareness that he was beaten to the analogy by Dorothy Day) that "Christian congregations meeting in catacombs" were like unto "workers' rallies in city squares." Elsewhere, he dreams of the day when our descendants "will think of Saint Agnes and Rosa Luxemburg, Saint Francis and Eugene Debs, Father Damien and Jean Jaures, as members of a single movement."

This enlistment of saints in the long march of hope highlights both the central quandary of Rorty's vision and the challenge he poses to the Christian social imagination. Rorty wants to live off the moral interest of the faith without tending to the metaphysical principle. In Achieving Our Country, he argues that a hope-bearing civil religion must separate the "fraternity and loving kindness" enjoined by the gospel from "the idea of supernatural parentage, immortality, and providence." Rorty justifies this separation in Philosophy and Social Hope by invoking the pragmatist repudiation of metaphysics authorized by Dewey and James.

But the insufficiency of pragmatism as a basis for political hope and action was best explained long ago by Randolph Bourne, who noted the alacrity with which Dewey and his band of instrumentalists marched to the beat of the war drums in 1917. A nice enough philosophy for nice people like Dewey, Bourne wrote, pragmatism buckled when faced with avarice, bloodlust, and the "new tastes for power that are springing up like poisonous mushrooms on every hand." Besides, while Dewey recurred to "values" (just as Rorty goes on about "kindness" and "humanitarianism"), there was, Bourne mordantly remarked, "that unhappy ambiguity" as to "just how values were created."

The futility of pragmatism as a basis for social hope lay, in other words, in its inability to do what Rorty himself concedes only religion does: hold "reality and justice in a single vision." A religious and specifically Christian appeal to social hope grounds its demands in metaphysics: that is, in a belief that creation is good because a God who is love has crafted an "ontology of peace," as John Milbank has put it so well, wherein love is not an ideal but the most lucid and penetrating realism.

And that is why the vigor and generosity of Rorty's social hope witnesses against much of the Christian social imagination of our time: mush about "compassion" and "social justice," proposals to "mitigate" the brutalities of the market. We who know that our faith is the hope and not the conscience of a world in the grip of mammon should be scandalized by this degeneration. We must reclaim our own history of hope, compose our own account of possibility, and declare that our dreams comport with the moral and metaphysical architecture of creation. Redemption is the grandest, most realistic, and most political hope of all.

Eugene McCarraher teaches humanities at Villanova University and American history at the University of Delaware. His book, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought, has just been published by Cornell University Press.

RELATED ARTICLE: Books discussed in this essay

The Real American Dream
A Meditation on Hope
by Andrew Delbanco
Harvard University Press,
$19.95, 143 pp.

Philosophy and Social Hope
by Richard Rorty
Penguin, $13.95, 288 pp.
Achieving Our Country
Leftist Thought in

Twentieth-Century America
by Richard Rorty

Harvard University Press,
$12.95, 176 pp.

The Future of American Progressivism
by Roberto Mangebeira Unger and Cornel West
Beacon Press, $12, 93 pp.

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