NOW COME the commencement speeches. The ones that move audiences and draw comments tend to be harsh critiques of the present condition of American life. The indispensable Tony Judt recently wrote a book, tellingly titled “Ill Fares the Land,’’ that was compared by reviewers to graduation rhetoric, especially because Judt declared that “this book was written for young people.’’
Judt is suffering from a terminal illness, and his book was also compared to a last will and testament, but its critique is harsh indeed: “Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For 30 years, we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.’’ Judt strikes a particularly compelling note when he decries the missed opportunity for social transformation that followed the Cold War. “The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts,’’ he writes.
The twisted structure of social inequality is a blatant feature of contemporary American life, and one wants to believe Judt when he declares, “We cannot go on living like this.’’ But his jeremiad calls to mind a long line of such pronouncements that points, alas, to a permanent capacity exactly for “living like this.’’
Going back the 30 years of Judt’s time frame, one thinks, say, of Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism,’’ a broad social complaint that, though lodged from the right, saw the generational preference for “personal growth’’ as an undercutting of the common good. Lasch was one of Jimmy Carter’s consultants ahead of his “crisis of confidence’’ speech that year. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,’’ Carter warned. “But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.’’
If Judt is right, we had discovered no such thing. America’s overwhelmingly negative reaction to Carter’s sermon suggests how little interest the nation has in being chastised. Ignoring Carter’s warnings, both the nation’s energy crisis and social inequality have only worsened.
Twenty years before Carter, there was John Kenneth Galbraith denouncing, in his 1958 book, “The Affluent Society,’’ the savage but fully accepted national dichotomy between private wealth and public squalor. Galbraith lambasted the whole American enterprise for being organized to serve the interests of the rich. No one wanted to face up to the dread fact that the economy was itself the engine of inequality. “These are days,’’ he wrote, “when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted . . . when the bland lead the bland.’’
Only two years earlier, it was C. Wright Mills and “The Power Elite,’’ a foundational dissecting of the already defining interplay of America’s Cold War military ethos (“the war economy’’), class prejudice, and a self-perpetuating establishment. “It is the political task of the social scientist — as of any liberal educator — continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning.’’
One begins to see that such prophetic notes spring from a tradition that is essential to America, not a shallow contempt for the present condition, as if the past were always better, but a steady impulse toward self-criticism that makes the nation what it is. Rachel Carson, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Jane Jacobs, Betty Friedan — all within living memory. Yet the prophetic vision of failed American grandeur dates at least to Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,’’ 1870: “I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States.’’
Where Tony Judt bemoaned the damage wrought by locusts, Whitman saw serpents. “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. . . . The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining today sole master of the field,’’ Whitman wrote.
Irony abides in such a tradition of criticism, for the end of such negative reckoning is the supreme affirmation that this nation is most fully itself in honestly acknowledging the gulf between reality and ideal. The uplift, from Judt to Whitman, is in the clearly stated truth.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.
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