The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (21 page)

Although my own outlook is shaped by Protestant Christian commitments, and this historical analysis has concentrated on the legacy of Protestantism as the most influential religious group shaping American culture, these proposals should apply to any religious subcommunity. One of the most
significant changes that has taken place in the past half-century
has been the vast increase in ethnic and religious diversity that has been fostered by new immigration policies. Accommodating religious diversity in American life today can no longer
plausibly be talked about, as it was in the mid-twentieth century, in terms of “Protestant-Catholic-Jew.” It is instead about equity for communities that represent virtually every religion in the world.

Finally, the sorts of people who are on center stage in this historical essay, public intellectuals, might play a leading role in facilitating discussions about the relation of the religious to the secular in the public domain. To some extent that, too, is already happening. The news media seem to now recognize the value of including different religious voices along with secular commentators, more so than they did a quarter-century ago. Furthermore, the Internet has provided public access to a huge variety of viewpoints. This access, though potentially helpful, can also be fragmenting, since most people go to sites that reinforce their preconceptions. What is needed is for the journalistic media, especially the outlets that still have access to a broad readership, to see one of their tasks as providing leadership in cultivating a public domain as fully inclusive of religiously shaped viewpoints as is feasible. Secularist commentators, rather than writing polemics denouncing religion in the name of universal reason, might better wrestle with the issues of how to respect both secular and religious viewpoints and institutions in the public domain. All sides need to recognize that we cannot go back to either a secular enlightenment or a Christian consensus, and that culture-war stances are not helpful alternatives. Rather, all sides need to recognize that they should be searching for ways to build a more fully inclusive pluralism.

Acknowledgments

This book has been greatly improved through
the help of others. I am particularly grateful to my friends James Bratt, John Haas, Richard Mouw, William Svelmoe, Leonard Vander Zee, and Grant Wacker for reading all or parts of versions of this work and providing insightful comments. I am also thankful to be working once again with Lara Heimert, previously my principal editor for
Jonathan Edwards: A Life
(Yale University Press). She has been especially helpful in bringing this book into focus. Roger Labrie helped immensely in carrying through on the details of that enterprise. He combined impressive editorial skills with a fine knowledge of the historical era. The careful copyediting of Katherine Streckfus provided many improvements. Katy O'Donnell offered editorial assistance at various points in the process. Rachel King as project editor kept things running efficiently.

My greatest gratitude is, as always, to my wife, Lucie. I am all the more appreciative of her love and support during the years when this book was being written, a time when we each went through serious illness that helped us to reckon with our mortality and to appreciate the gifts of each day together.

Notes

Generally, the works by a single author pertaining
to a given
passage within a chapter are cited at the end of the passage, with page numbers appearing in the order cited.

Introduction

1. Alan Ehrenhalt,
The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), 110, 265–267, 271.

2. Ross Douthat,
Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
(New York: Free Press, 2012); Tom Brokaw,
The Greatest Generation
(New York: Random House, 1998).

3. Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
premiered in 1949 and
was first published by Viking Press the same year.
Catcher in the Rye
, by J. D. Salinger, was published in 1951 by Little, Brown. The other quotations in this passage are references to David Riesman,
The Lonely Crowd
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961 [1950]); Erich Fromm,
The Sane Society
(Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1965 [1955]); William Whyte,
The Organization Man
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957 [1956]); and Vance Packard,
The Status Seekers
(New York: Pocket Books, 1961 [1959]).

4. Ideally, analysis such as this should do more to place American thought in its European contexts and also involve more
comparative analysis. Those valuable features would make for a considerably longer and more technical book.

5. Lionel Trilling,
The Liberal Imagination:
Essays on Literature and Society
(New York: Viking Press, 1950), ix. I also have avoided the “conservative” versus “liberal” debates of the time, largely because I am interested in the dominant moderate-liberal consensus outlook, and conservatism (aside from populist militant anticommunism) seemed much more a minority opinion then than it does today.

6. The debates among historians and philosophers about the meanings of “the enlightenment” are far too complex to enter into here. One simply has to recognize that the term can be used in many different ways and then define the way in which one is using it. Nonetheless, “the enlightenment” is still a useful shorthand for designating characteristic dominant patterns of eighteenth-
century European thought, or, in the present case, eighteenth-century
British-American thought, especially as manifested among the founders of the United States. Later postmodern critiques of “the enlightenment project” had roots at midcentury in the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorono, Jewish émigrés to the United States who published their seminal work in 1944 (in German). It was later translated into English as
Dialectic of Enlightenment
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

7. Mark Noll,
America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), provides a valuable account of the merger of Protestant and enlightenment outlooks. Noll builds on Henry May's classic,
The Enlightenment in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), which provides an insightful account of the varieties of enlightenment thought.

8. At a late stage in working on this project, I am very pleased to see David A. Hollinger's “The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted,” in his
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism
in Modern American History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1–17, which puts emphasis parallel to my own on the interpretative importance of the enlightenment for understanding mid-twentieth-century culture and religion.

9. The best systematic exploration of the collapse of the Protestant establishment remains Robert Wuthnow,
The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

10. St. Augustine, or Augustine of Hippo, lived from 356 to 430. His theology is widely admired by many Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant (such as my own Reformed or Calvinistic) circles. To be Augustinian means to share in a classic orthodox heritage of basic Christian understandings and commitments. It also involves views on the relationship of faith and reason, as explained in the Conclusion.

Prologue: The National Purpose

1. The original series appeared in
Life
weekly from May 23 through June 20, 1960. The quotations in this section are from the book version, John K. Jessup, ed.,
The National Purpose
(New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1960), as follows: Luce, v; Jessup, 17–18; Lippmann, 126–127, 130–131; Rossiter, 83; Gardner, 71–73; MacLeish, 37; Graham, 66–68, 62; Stevenson, 28; Wohlstetter, 95–102; Reston, 109.
Life
's readership figure is stated in Daniel Bell,
The End of Ideology
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 34. The number is presumably based on the magazine typically being looked at by several family members. The magazine itself listed an “average circulation 6,700,000.”

Chapter One: Mass Media and the National Character

1. David Halberstam,
The Fifties
(New York: Random House, 1993), 643–666, provides an engaging overview of this controversy to which I am much indebted.

2. John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson, November 5, 1959,
Steinbeck:
A Life in Letters
(New York: Viking, 1975), 652; “Have We Gone Soft?”
The New Republic
, February 15, 1960, 11–15.

3. “Television History—The First 75 Years: 1959 NYC Evening Program Schedule,” www.tvhistory.tv/1959-PrimeTime.jpg. Leonard Bernstein was also offering Young People's Concerts on Saturday afternoons.

4. Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” reprinted from
Diogenes
1, no. 3 (1953): 1–17, in
Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America
, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 59–73.

5. David Manning White, “Mass Culture in America: Another Point of View,” an expanded version of “What's Happening to Mass Culture?”
Saturday Review
39 (1956): 11–13, reprinted in
Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America,
Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 13–21.

6. Bernard Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” in
Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America
, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 3–12.

7. Hannah Arendt, “Society and Culture,”
Daedalus
89, no. 2, Mass Culture and Mass Media Issue (1960): 284, 286.

8. James Baldwin, “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes,”
Daedalus
89, no. 2, Mass Culture and Mass Media Issue (1960): 373–376.

9. Edwards Shils, “Mass Society and Its Culture,”
Daedalus
89, no. 2, Mass Culture and Mass Media Issue (1960): 290, 309, 314.

10. Norman Jacobs, “Introduction to the Issue on ‘Mass Culture and Mass Media,
'
”
Daedalus
89, no. 2, Mass Culture and Mass Media Issue (1960): 275.

11. The most famous symposium was “Our Country and Our Culture,”
Partisan Review
19, no. 3 (1952). For an overview of the discussions during the era, see Seymour Lipset, “Comments on ‘American Intellectuals: Their Politics and Status,
'
”
Daedalus
88, no. 3 (1959): 460–486. Other commentators on the topic in the
same issue included Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Karl Deutsch, Talcott Parsons, and Daniel Bell (pp. 487–498).

12. John Dewey,
A Common Faith
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934).

13. Richard Hofstadter,
Anti-intellectualism in American Life
(New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 7, 117, 145, 159; Richard Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform
(New York: Vintage, 1955).

14. That was the argument of Russell Jacoby in
The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe
(New York: Basic Books, 1987).

Chapter Two: Freedom in the Lonely Crowd

1. Bernard Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” in
Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America
, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 9.

2. Erich Fromm,
Escape from Freedom
(New York: Avon Books, 1965 [1941]. The list of Jewish émigrés is in Wilfred M. McClay,
The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 195–196. McClay's book also provides valuable analysis and background to many of the themes in this chapter.

3. Fromm,
Escape from Freedom
, viii, 208–209.

4. Ibid., 173, 186 (emphasis in original). Fromm's outlook was related to that of the heavy-duty intellectual theorists of the “Frankfurt School,” Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. He shared their concern over “the authoritarian personality,” as Adorno and his coauthors put it in their massive sociological and theoretical study (T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford,
The Authoritarian Personality
[New York: Harper, 1950]). These philosophers decried “the enlightenment,” but they themselves had great confidence in social scientific methods. Fromm had broken with these theorists over a number of issues. He also differed from them in that he could write engagingly in English.

5. Erich Fromm,
The Sane Society
(Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1965 [1955]), 309, 311, 64, cf. 17–19, 29–66, 122, 139–146, 315.

6.
The brilliant intellectual historian Perry Miller had recently brought attention to the jeremiad as a favorite American Puritan genre. Miller himself celebrated Puritan intellectualism, joining others of his generation in lamenting America's decline to anti-intellectualism
. See, especially, his two volumes on the subject,
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), and
The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).

7.
The Sane Society
had gone through sixteen printings by 1966. Mainstream reviewers tended to be impressed by its insights, but they did point out that some of its psychological categories for interpreting history were speculative. See, for example, the review by Joseph Wood Krutch,
New York Times
, September 4, 1955, 9. Fromm's most popular book,
The Art of Loving
(1956) was a sort of how-to book. Learning how to love was an art, he suggested, and learning that art (and the alternatives to it) was the key to countering modern alienation.

James Hudnut-Beumler, in
Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 91, said that Riesman borrowed the concepts (although apparently not the exact phrases) “inner-directed” and “other-directed” from Fromm's
Man for Himself
(1947), and that Fromm adopted them from Martin Heidegger.

The commentator was Eric Larrabee, in “David Riesman and His Readers,” in
Culture and Social Character: The Work of David Riesman
Reviewed
, Seymour Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), 406. The
Time
cover appeared on September 27, 1954, for the cover story entitled “Freedom—New Style.”

8.
This topic has been covered in many works. Martin Halli
­well,
American Culture in the 1950s
(Edinburgh: University of
Edinburgh Press, 2007), provides a useful overview of culture at all levels. Another convenient introduction is David Castronovo,
Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s That Made American Culture
(New York: Continuum, 2004).

9. David Riesman,
The Lonely Crowd
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961 [1950]), xxxiii, 9–19, 19–24, 58–62, 37.

10. William Whyte,
The Organization Man
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957 [1956]), 11, 3, 7, 17, 31–32, 35, 13, 437, 443, 448.

11. Vance Packard,
The Hidden Persuaders
(New York: D. McKay, 1957), 200. Historian David Potter offered a more academic and judicious assessment of the role of advertising in his
People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). Potter put the subject in a historical framework, arguing that what had long made the United States distinctive was the presence of unprecedented abundance.

12. Vance Packard,
The Status Seekers
(New York: Pocket Books, 1961 [1959]), 316.

13. This example is taken from Daniel Bell,
The End of Ideology
(New York: Free Press, 1960), 35. Bell noted only that it was the December 1958 issue of
Reader's Digest
. The
Reader's Digest
circulation at the time was 12 million;
Women's Day
's circulation was 5 million.

14. Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997 [1963]). Ralph Ellison's novel
Invisible Man
(New York: Random House, 1952) was part of the discourse of the alienation of modern people as it related to African Americans. Though it was influential, it did not have the direct social impact of Friedan's work. In Friedan's book, as in other works on “modern man” in the era, African Americans remained invisible.