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The Disorder of American Society: Daniel Bell's Cultural Analysis
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18046 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
7,242 Words |
| Author
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David Gress
David Gress is professor of classics at Aarhus University,
Denmark, and fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute
in Philadelphia. He is the author of works on European history
and contemporary international relations, among them A History
of West Germany 1945-1991 (with Dennis Bark, 1993) and From
Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998).
His most recent book is The Flickering Lamp: History,
Education, and American Culture in the New Century. |
Finding and analyzing the American character use to be a European Preoccupation, from St. John de Crevecoeur in the late eighteenth century to the greatest of all, Alexis de Tocqueville, in the nineteenth, and to Werner Sombart and Raymond Arion in the twentieth. Lately it has become an American preoccupation as well, as witness the authors being examined in these essays. In the past, for leading scholars and writers to begin diagnosing and assessing the character of their own countrymen was a sign of decadence. Societies and cultures on the rise are too busy and confident for introspection; it is only after defeat in war, or when foreigners start beating the natives at their own games, whether in business, diplomacy, or living standards, that a people finds the time and the urge to analyze itself, to look for its own "character," and to ask, fearfully, what the future holds.
Is the wave of self-analysis we are here examining then a symptom of decadence? Perhaps. About twenty years ago, as a student in Denmark, I often heard the phrase, coined by a European critic of America during the Vietnam War, that the United States was the only empire in history that had gone straight from rise to decline, with no period of greatness in between. The criticism was double-edged, because it deliberately did not specify where the decadence lay: in failing to win the Vietnam War, or in fighting it at all. It was also typical of that blend of resignation and disillusionment that spread from Europe to America in the early 1970s and turned that decade into one of almost obsessive introspection. The self-inflicted defeat in Vietnam, the oil crisis of 1973-74, Watergate, the perceived environmental crisis, and the sluggish economy all told us that, in some vague and ill-defined sense, we were not doing things right any more. It was precisely the vagueness of the feeling that produced the demand for analysis, for a definition of the American character and its problems that would also promise a solution to all these messes.
Most of what was written in response to that demand has not stood the test of time. The confidence and surface glamour of the Reagan years, though brittle and easily shaken, seemed to disprove the diagnosis of malaise and decline. Numerous optimists set out to prove an opposite diagnosis: that America had recovered and would continue to do well in the best of all possible worlds. Yet, they failed to satisfy: it was no accident (as the Marxists used to say) that the best-selling grand historical analysis to appear in Reagan's last year was the transplanted British historian Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and that the one lesson everyone drew from this work was that America was suffering from
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