Hopelessly Hoping

For a self-professed “secular liberal,” Delbanco has a surprising and disturbing gift for conveying deprivation and loss. Just as he did in 1995 with his other major study, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, he manages by the end of The Real American Dream to make the reader feel almost haunted by God’s absence.

And yet, Delbanco still has hope for America — hope for the return of hope. The problem is that he wants to bring back hope with the thing that is the major cause of hope’s decline. His failure comes not in his convincing account of the origins of American hopefulness among the Puritans, nor in his tale of the decline of that hopefulness with the loss of the things that the Puritans and most of the succeeding generations of Americans believed. The failure of The Real American Dream comes in Delbanco’s Emersonian desire to “rekindle the smouldering nigh-quenched fire on the altar” with the liberalism to which he is committed — even as that liberalism continues to douse the flames of hope.

Like all respectable historians, Delbanco tries to avoid a simplistic tale of decline. Drawing upon impressive erudition, he shows that we have often thought of ourselves as in decay. He quotes Henry Adams’s remark that the decline of the presidency from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant is “evidence enough to upset Darwin.” And yet our current situation is unprecedented. We lack a “coherent symbology” to satisfy our “unslaked craving for transcendence.” Delbanco breaks down the history of the American hope into three stages, but our own era eludes categorization. He speaks of “three ideas — God, nation, and . . . what? the market? the recreational self? — by which Americans have tried to save themselves from the melancholy that threatens all reflective beings.”

In the past, Americans kept melancholy at bay by recourse to transforming narratives of hope. America began not with the absence but with the presence of God. Delbanco focuses on Puritan New England not because it encompasses the whole story of early America, but because it embodies the “purest strain . . . of the first American form of hope,” a form that gave “meaning to suffering and pain alike and promised deliverance from death.” Puritanism accentuates human hopelessness, leaves no room for chance, randomness, or the notion that human beings make “their own history.” In this, puritanism seems alien to contemporary sensibilities. But, in its suspicion of tradition and external authority, puritanism also provides an early example of the “American hostility to inherited privilege.” In its insistence, moreover, that beliefs are authenticated by the effects they produce in the individual’s life, puritanism is an early form of American pragmatism.

In the nineteenth century, under attack from rationalism and deism, puritanism began to wane. In the 1830s, Emerson wrote that its “creed is passing away and none arises in its room.” Not long after Emerson’s lament, the country found a new creed in the form of America herself. In this, the second form of American hope, the sacred nation became the symbol and incarnation of transcendence. Walt Whitman described it as the era in which the “divine literatus” would replace the priest. The transference of the sacred from religion to the state is palpable in Herman Melville’s insistence on the providential role of America and his reference to the “great God absolute, centre and circumference of all democracy.”

Lincoln, of course, is the one most responsible for identifying the nation as the embodiment of transcendent ideals. To Lincoln, for instance, we owe the elevation of the Declaration of Independence to a sacred document. But Lincoln’s shrouding of nationalism in the language of religion did not involve the celebration of a Volk or Patria rooted in ties of blood. Rather, he proposed a community based on universal human rights, counterbalanced by responsibilities and the opportunities afforded by free labor. Lincoln’s vision of an entrepreneurial society whose participants are unencumbered by their origin dominates American culture from Lincoln’s death well into the 1960s.

Ah, the 1960s: Vietnam, the civil rights riots, the assassinations, and Nixon’s coming. This is the period when America lost its nerve, its aspiration, its ability to affirm the future, and thus its hope. In the aftermath, we have become skilled at deconstructing old stories but inept at constructing new ones. Delbanco laments the absence of any “genuine engagement with the polity,” the loss of a sense of our common destiny, of an ideal that is worth “tears, sacrifice, and death.” But he does not believe that the current situation of cultural deprivation can endure. Relying on Tocqueville’s assertion that faith is the natural state of humanity, Delbanco insists that “something new is coming,” that we cannot for long endure as a people without some affirming narrative of who we are. Just as Emerson was wrong to suggest in the 1830s that nothing would replace puritanism, so it would be hasty for us to assume that nothing will replace the religious nationalism that informed our public life from the Civil War to the 1960s. Like Emerson, Delbanco now waits for a new creed, a new form of democratic hope.

But here the analogy with Emerson falters, since the situation at the time of the marginalization of the Puritan God is quite different from our own. The second form of American hope drew upon the resources of the first. Delbanco’s book reads like a defense of Whitman’s claim that at the “core of democracy is the religious element.” We have, it seems, been living off the religious capital of our tradition, and we have so depleted our capital that it is now unclear what resources are left to us.

Delbanco is rightly wary of suggestions that we should just pick a story arbitrarily or each construct a self out of the fragments we have inherited from the past. This would only exacerbate the situation by feeding the tendency to see the self as supreme, as beholden to nothing other than its own preferences. He quotes Emerson: “Faith makes us, and not we it.” The difficulty is that, according to Delbanco, we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence. It is not just the case that we cannot return to the old narratives in their old forms; that would be reactionary and doomed to failure. The deeper problem is that, by Delbanco’s account, we cannot believe in the truth of any grand narrative the way our ancestors did. Puritanism contained pragmatic elements within a cosmic vision of good and evil. But we have become self-conscious pragmatists, attempting to stand outside or above any particular cultural vision and choose whatever suits us best. In spite of his acute sense of our predicament, Delbanco himself seems to think that when it comes to the question of truth, this sort of pragmatism is the best we can do. His noble and classical longing, the “unquenchable human need to feel connected to something larger than the insular self,” is at odds with the fashionable epistemology he bemoans but seems nonetheless to accept.

A similar contradiction afflicts Delbanco’s previous study of how we came to be where we are now. In The Death of Satan, Delbanco examines the “gulf” that “has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it.” His darkly apocalyptic thesis is that, “if evil . . . escapes the reach of our imagination, it will have established dominion over us all.” In an attempt to reinvigorate the sense of evil, Delbanco covers roughly the same terrain as he does in The Real American Dream, beginning with the Puritan strategies for naming and wrestling with evil and proceeding to tell a story of the erosion of our ability to name evil. We now approach an “unprecedented condition of inarticulate dread.”

Faced with this prospect, what are we to do? In both The Death of Satan and The Real American Dream, Delbanco attempts to carve out a middle ground between such liberal ironists as Richard Rorty (who think that we should simply dispense with the traditional metaphors for grappling with evil) and serious Christians and Jews (who embrace those metaphors as something more than metaphors). His solution is to agree that “we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence,” but to claim that we can nonetheless use traditional metaphors to maintain “the health of society.”

This pragmatic recourse to metaphor proves, in the end, a feeble basis upon which to erect a robust, imaginative vision of good and evil. In The Death of Satan and now in The Real American Dream, Andrew Delbanco is caught, aware of the problem but unable to face it squarely. Despite his stunning acumen and his admirable longing for a new form of democratic hope, Delbanco ends up confirming something we suspected all along: the woeful inadequacy of secular liberalism to address our current predicament.

Thomas Hibbs teaches philosophy at Boston College and is the author of Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld (Spence).