America the pitiful

Two new books document the dearth of spirit in our material world.

by Michael Anft
7/12/00

The American Paradox:
Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty

By David G. Myers
Yale University Press, 295 pages, $29.95

Almost Home: America's Love-Hate
Relationship With Community

By David L. Kirp
Princeton University Press, 337 pages, $22.95

We've got it made, right? Market's up, crime's down, unemployment and inflation continue to scrape bottom while consumer confidence explodes into the stratosphere. The world's our oyster, now that those Russkies are out of the superpower picture and our technological advances are set to recolonize the globe. With more people more flush than ever in our recession/expansion, economic-roller-coaster history, there's not too much we overfed, endlessly entertained, upper 80 percent of Americans can whine about, right?

Uh, not quite. Even with all of this money floating around, as evidenced by increases in such indicators as the home-ownership rate and household median income, there's something missing, we're told. Maybe, the navel-gazers say, it's a little bit of soul.

David G. Myers, a social psychology professor at Hope College in Holland, Mich., and author of The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty, puts it this way: "We have espresso coffee, the World Wide Web, sport utility vehicles, and caller ID. And we have less happiness, more depression, more fragile relationships, less communal commitment, less vocational security, more crime (even after the recent decline), and more demoralized children." Even the Wooden Man himself, Vice President Al Gore, feels it, decrying "a spiritual crisis in modern civilization that seems to be based on an emptiness at its center and the absence of a larger spiritual purpose." David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Almost Home: America's Love-Hate Relationship With Community, sees things the same way, but renders them a bit more poetically: "We live in a time of peace and prosperity without precedent. By rights, we should be rejoicing, but from every corner the wails of Cassandras drown out the Whitmanesque song-singers. Why, if we are so rich, do we feel so poor?"

And why, one might counter, do we feel the need to put our poor widdle wealthy selves through the nation-state equivalent of a midlife crisis, given the daily survival struggle most of the rest of the world endures? And hasn't the United States--founded largely on the work-ethic-dominated moral strictures of John Calvin and settled though a combination of Calvinistic divine predetermination (see Manifest Destiny) and that pinnacle of British individualism, private property--always had problems reconciling its material and so-called "spiritual" sides? New "communitarians" such as Myers and Kirp--well-heeled academics published by Ivy League presses--couch some of their arguments against conspicuous consumption and "radical individualism" (Myers' phrase) in new terms. But haven't liberals (who have long decried the community-corroding effects of unfettered capitalism) and conservatives (who've favored religion-based conformity to the welfare state) always railed against the disparity between America's civic and private lives?

Maybe so, Myers argues, but the country's current failings regarding crime, sexual behavior, violence, the media, the accumulation of wealth, and especially The Family result from more than 30 years of loose morals and transcend traditional class and political boundaries. Yes, Myers--like the revisionist boomers he's obviously writing for--blames those hedonistic, do-your-own-thing '60s for starting us down the road to ethical and metaphysical ruin. "[F]rom 1960 until the early 1990s . . . America slid into a deepening social recession that dwarfed the comparatively milder and briefer economic recessions that often dominated our news and politics," he writes, reciting an alarming litany: A doubled divorce rate, tripled teen-suicide rate, quadrupled violent-crime rate, quintupled prison population, a sevenfold increase in "cohabitation," a decline in the number of us joining civic associations. Boiling down scads of social-science research, Myers paints a grim picture of turn-of-the-millennium, every-man-for-himself America: "When individualism is taken to the extreme, individuals become its ironic casualties."

While the conservative, religious family man Myers favors collecting studies and extracting his views from them, the liberal, secular, and gay Kirp doggedly follows the dangling carrot of the journalist: the telling anecdote. Kirp follows such pro-and-con communitarian examples as one woman's fight against class discrimination in housing, a corporation's sensitive response to employees with AIDS, a school system's reaction to an influx of poor immigrants, and the calming effects of San Francisco's "community boards" on simmering neighborhood disputes. But even though the authors have produced different books from often contradistinctive political tangents, they come to astonishingly similar conclusions. Read this excerpt from Kirp's intro and try to contrast it with Myers' a paragraph above: "Individualism has acquired a harsh edge as people grow overly self-centered, uncivil, and civilly disengaged." With liberals and conservatives talking the same language, perhaps we can expect hell to freeze over next.

Myers' book is the more substantial of the two. With unerring focus, he attacks nine areas (in nine chapters) that have led navel-gazing academics to question whether our economic prosperity has made us more selfish, socially lazy, and morally corrupt. While his remedy for turning things around--altruism through godly faith--is arguably simpleminded and too much of a justification of his own belief system, there's little doubt that he's right when he implies that secularists in government and advocacy groups have failed to articulate any compelling hope or vision for the future that transcends the narcissism and material well-being of the upper 80 percent of Americans. (Although a few of the good-for-all-of-us things that have caught on, such as recycling, do result from their best intentions.) For all the Clinton/Gore bluster about volunteerism and community service, there's been no question that "the economy, stupid" has been the hallmark of their administration. All of the happy communitarian talk, in light of the president's moral misdeeds, looks like so much Elmer Gantry-esque pulpit pounding.

While decrying our present state, Myers earns credit for not being a classic conservative nostalgist, recalling accurately as he does the overfilled orphanages earlier in this century as well as the McCarthyism and nuclear nightmare of the '50s. Still, we shouldn't let him off the hook for offering such an exact and traditional prescription for our ills, one that seemingly would exclude those who wonder about the relevancy of the world's most popular religions, which Myers thoroughly recommends for providing ample opportunity to make connections with others. At one crucial point in his argument, the author goes off the philosophical deep end: "If God does not exist, one might still argue that faith is prudent--better to believe in something [author's italics ] beyond the self." Most of the nonbelievers I know lead moral lives within their communities, without feeling the need to live a lie to suit Myers' argument. The question begs to be asked: If it's true, as Myers reports, that 96 percent of Americans believe in God, then how has America's spirituality and community-mindedness gone so far south? How in the hell did we get in this mess in the first place?

While Kirp rummages around society's edges looking for relevance--and only occasionally finds it--his extended essay is much more inclusive, featuring more real people of color and lower social station than Myers' cast of fellow academics and like-minded social-science writers (although Gandhi and Cornel West are also cited in his work). Kirp's focus, in contrast to Myers' one-answer-fits-all approach, is on the fuzzy margins, where new relationships between communities--black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and assimilated--develop, often without specific precedent. Kirp's underlying assumption is that this part of America is still being made through negotiation and experimentation. God or no, people will learn, he writes: "[A] great deal of value can be extracted from the histories of ordinary people--individuals who under extraordinary circumstances discovered their better selves, and in the process helped to repair civic life."

Kirp's take on fractured America is much more hopeful than Myers' while being more grounded in reality. Unfortunately, the book's structure and the dryness of Kirp's writing make Almost Home a tough go. Many of the book's 15 essays, some of which were written with co-authors for various magazines during the '90s, seem married via the shotgun: Does hemophiliacs' outrage at the medical industry really have that much in common (in the communitarian sense) with the needle-exchange debate, except that they share an unfortunate link to the AIDS epidemic? Such facileness rears its head elsewhere as well, as when Kirp's ponderous portraits of pro-assimilationists Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez are twisted around to suit his purpose. Making a point as obvious as Kirp's--the boiled-down version: We don't know exactly how we'll get along, but we'll eventually figure it out--shouldn't be as labored regarding its details and so glib at tying the various strands together. It ain't easy for disparate communities to fulfill their entangled desires for places in the community writ large; it follows that its chroniclers shouldn't expect things to fall together so smoothly either.

Michael Anft writes about book for Baltimore City Paper.