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 But this narrowing of the trajectory of our national story from God to Nation and now to Self also has a down side. We compensate for the loss of a collective story with an almost hysterical accumulation of wealth and by obsessing about the ready pleasures of sex. In the long run, says Delbanco, this emphasis on money and sex leaves deep human needs unsatisfied. As all religions understand, the body does not endure.
"Americans feel isolated in themselves. They no longer feel that issues of national responsibility are part of their lives," he said. "The Depression is long past and seems unlikely ever to recur. We have won the battles against fascism and communism. To many people, there seem to be no great issues. There is the endangered environment, of course, but how urgent do we consider the danger to be? Do we feel a real connection between turning on the air conditioner now and destroying the ozone layer at some remote time in the abstract future? How many of us really feel the great and growing gap between wealth and poverty in this country?"
Without some sense of engagement in life beyond the fleeting pleasures of the self, life is impoverished, and a creeping sense of melancholy takes hold.
"We face, as a nation, a problem that every generation of immigrants to America has separately faced--from the Puritans to the Southern and Eastern Europeans who came over in the 19th century, to the Asian immigrants in our time," said Delbanco. "How do you understand your relation to your heroic forebears? They took the risks. They made the sacrifices. And who are you? You are their beneficiaries. Do you deserve to be? What does it mean to be--by dint of some forebear's emigration--an American?"
"These have been the questions that every second or third generation American has asked himself or herself; and one result of the effort to answer them has been successive waves of rich literature."
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