The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope

Rating:
Summary: An academic who can write!
Review: Anyone wondering what makes this country tick will find a fascinating thesis contained in just 100 readable pages. Obviously the scholarship is deep and thorough, but the thinking is fresh and applicable. (Did you ever wonder why the word 'academic' means 'useless'? This book is just the opposite.) At the end, when Professor Delbanco gets to the present day,though, he seems to run out of steam, and loses some of his clarity. He just kind of ends the book without really drawing the powerful conclusion he's leading to -- but a thought-provoking and important book nonetheless.

Rating:
Summary: fair
Review: I have not read Delbanco's other work on Puritanism, but judging by his gloss of the subject in The Real American Dream-, I am not sure I would. I bought the book based on its endorsement from Richard Rorty, an intellectual I admire and take quite seriously. But Delbanco does not seem to sincerely engage with modes of Christian thought in a way that that Rorty would, This I find disappointing.

Delbanco selects examples of evangelical excessiveness and perversion to depict the heart of early Puritanical thinking. This I find poor. Instead of real scholarship on the issue, in a way that George Marsden exhibits in his work on American religious history, Delbanco is content to perpetuate, even elevate popular stereotypes of early American Christianity. If this kind of whimsical and polemical gloss were constructed about Islam or Buddhism, there would surely be some kind of backlash.

For example, on pages 28 and 29, Delbanco addresses the Congregationalist style of "public profession" of faith. After merely mentioning the practice, he immediately goes into an anecdote about how such an experience nearly drove a woman insane. He did admit the she probably suffered from bi-polar disease, but what is his point? Is that his message about the history of Congregationalism? Delbanco paints all of mainstream American faith as if it were a fringe cult on the evening news.

After having read this section, I come away feeling like I have been given a series of anecdotes from a liberal academic that feels so comfortable in his disdain for Christian thought he need not be penetrating or thorough, merely offhand and dismissive. And this approach is no doubt acceptable to most readers, but not all.

I recommend reading this book, but more as a novel of hope. It has an important subject and penetrating insights about the American condition we all experience.

Rating:
Summary: Seeking A Cultural Cure For Depression
Review: Oddly enough, the book is about avoiding depression. But rather than offering the normal remedies (therapy, the correct choice of psychoactive drugs, a regimen of positive thinking) the author believes that some vision of transcendence provided by our shared culture is the only psychological salvation. This vision may be religious in form, as it was for the Puritans, or it may be secularized, as it was from roughly 1850 to the 1960's. Between the late 60's and the 80's "something died, or at least fell dormant"; there is now no vision greater than the self (and he asserts this would imply a social vision, one involving "fellowship and reciprocity"). As a consequence, he believes people nowadays are increasingly depressed, as the term was defined by the likes of Lionel Trilling and Graham Greene.

The books is pitched at a very high level of synthesis, but somehow he pulls it off. It is beautifully written; the sweeping sentences are laden with apt quotations and rich with resonance. The sense of compact assurance falls off a bit at the end as he tries to draw conclusions about our current cultural plight (as he sees it). His is basically a religious sensibility, one he would like to persuade us all people (or at least thinking people) share and all societies need, preferably focussed on increasing justice for everyone, although he's not really sure a purely secular version works, since the secular project seems to have failed. He's engaging in social psychology, relating our current lack of a sustaining social faith to a pervasively sick personal psychology. It's a genre of cultural criticism, very high minded and sincere. But many people are oblivious to this genre and even manage to live meaningful or at least happy lives without experiencing the sense of insulated selfhood and anomie that he describes. Some might be better off if they did, and one of the satisfactions of reading such a book is the feeling that "I, at least, share this refined and ennobling sensitivity." Unfortunately, many readers, whether oblivious or ennobled, will not be persuaded to energize the admirable liberal social values he affirms by the argument that they are a cure for their own psychological ills.