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The Warping of the American Spirit
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20109 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
3,084 Words |
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Carl F.H. Henry
Carl F.H. Henry, an evangelical theologian, is the author of
more than thirty books, among them The Uneasy Conscience of
Modern Fundamentalism and the six-volume work God, Revelation,
and Authority. |
THE RISE OF SELFISHNESS IN AMERICA
James Lincoln Collier
New York: Oxford University Press, 1991
308 pp., $24.95
While Eastern European countries eagerly look westward for a model of democracy and freedom, historian and sociologist James Lincoln Collier warns that America has undergone an inversion of values that invites national disaster. In The Rise of Selfishness in America he sketches sweeping social changes in attitude and behaviors and finds in the recently escalating displacement of self-restraint by self-gratification the looming possibilities of a national end-time.
Collier is no uncritical champion of Victorian repression. Its skewed view of paternalism and sexuality, its double standard idealizing women, its excessive control of children understandably provoked a costly reaction. Yet he insists that Americans traded Victorianism for something far worse: the widespread forfeiture of a sense of moral duty. Not only do the bedrooms and living rooms of millions of Americans now accommodate evils once confined to red-light and vice districts, but the emerging national character abandons as well a predictable, stable, and basically decent society.
Since the 1970s, Collier contends, what previously had been a sporadic and gradual phenomenon--the ballooning of selfishness-has erupted into a narcissistic "ethic of self" that has scarred private and public life, until multitudes now view self-indulgence as ideal. It was neither World War II, nor even the fifties or sixties, Collier stresses, but rather the 1970s that accommodated the priority of the self in every arena of national life: love, work, sex, child rearing, politics, and religion. Neither political liberals nor conservatives now offer a well-articulated program for the whole nation, and in any event government cannot legislate the indulgent self out of existence. It is now highly questionable, Collier avers, whether the masses will turn from self-love to seek instead the well-being of society.
The High Price Of Selfishness
Among the bleak consequences of this self-centered society are its abandonment of children and of the family, and its expenditure of wealth for self-indulgent trifles rather than for public needs. America's shirking of parental responsibility is "unmatched in human history." If present trends
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