The paradise spell

YOU can tell that David Brooks gets around America. Here he is observing workaholics (himself?) coming down the aisle boarding a plane:

  They've got hand-free wires clipped to their shirt; they're trying to
  shimmy out of their suit coat and get their carry-on bag into the
  overhead rack without interrupting their cell-phone conversation. And
  they're talking faster and faster, because they know that in just a
  few minutes, the door of that plane is going to close, and they'll be
  ordered to turn off their phones and it'll be like someone ripped out
  their trachea. Cut off! Severed from the information superhighway!
  Restricted to the tiny capsule of their own immediate experience!...

  A few hours later, you can watch the infoholics as the plane begins
  its final descent. They slide their cell phones surreptitiously out of
  their pockets. They finger the buttons. You can see them wrestling
  with a moral quandary. At five hundred feet, they are tempted to turn
  on the phones, because they are pretty sure they can get coverage at
  that altitude. On the other hand, the pilots say cell-phone use
  disrupts the plane's navigational system.

Such is the life of Wireless Man, as Brooks calls him, one of dozens of illuminating word-pictures in his On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.([dagger]) The book is an exercise in "comic sociology," as Brooks's journalism has been known since writing Bobos in Paradise, but On Paradise Drive is more than spritely sociology. It tries to describe the essence of America, what makes this country such a success, why 4 percent of the world's people can produce one-third of its goods and services, and why people of such great cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity can live together mostly peaceably and civilly. Brooks's answer is that behind all our striving there is something spiritual. "We are influenced, far more than most of us admit, by some longing for completion, some impulse to heaven." We are bourgeois, to be sure, but for Brooks, "we are also a transcendental nation infused with everyday utopianism."

Brooks is an irrepressible optimist. He disciplines himself by acknowledging downsides, and admits that he does not give us a picture of all of America, omitting its chronic losers, couch potatoes, and resentful members of minority groups. None of these appear very much or even at all in his pages. He makes amusing journeys to the "cool zone" of bike-messenger land (think the Lower East Side) and the "crunchy zone" of the "granola" suburbs (think Takoma Park, Maryland), but he does not pay much attention to their denizens. Instead, he portrays most fully the small slice of Ivy-educated professional America he inhabits--the "red-hot center of the achievement ethos," as he puts it--and gives us wonderful vignettes of over-programmed children and hyperactive but amoral college students. "While few people in these neighborhoods have fought in wars, many have endured extensive home renovations," he bemusedly reports. Some of his observations have more general application. "The culture of schools has tightened," Brooks writes, and the evidence would seem to bear him out on this. The same goes for his observation that today's college students typically receive guidance on everything but morals.

HOW has the America Brooks describes come to be? Well, beginnings matter, and the explorers, colonists, and immigrants who came to these shores found a land of plenty that was full of possibility. By 1740, Americans enjoyed the world's highest standard of living, and they were only getting started. "In the eyes of those early Americans, the United States was not merely a nation, it was an eschatology. It was a vision of human fulfillment. This sense that America had a divinely ordained mission did not diminish with the years," Brooks writes.

For two centuries, as Brooks points out, visiting Europeans, novelists foreign and domestic, and social critics of all sorts have decried American materialism. Even foreign visitors with an affection for America--Alexis de Tocqueville, Luigi Barzini, John Keegan--voice the same complaint. But for Brooks our materialism is evidence of our energy, an energy that is transcendent. "Despite all the claims that American culture is secular, pragmatic and materialist, what is truly striking about this country is how material things are shot through with enchantment."

Plus, America has always provided the opportunity for exit. At one point Brooks describes a woman from Bethesda, Maryland, who hated the gentrification and trendiness of the 1990s there. "So she did what Americans always do when something bothers them. She moved on." Daniel Boone wanted elbow room; this woman sought out Loudoun County, Virginia, for the pleasant order of a rapidly growing exurb--the kind of place, as Brooks says, which "aspires to golf's paradisical vision" and "enshrines the pursuit of par." The late historian Robert Wiebe once wrote that Americans stayed together because they could live separately. Brooks notes that Americans move more than other people and increasingly cluster in places where they have an affinity with others. "So one comes across distinct cultural zones; and the people in one community sometimes know very little about the people in the community just up the road."