Lerner's Flying Carpet

AMERICA AS A CIVILIZATION (1,036 pp.) --Max Lerner--Simon & Schuster ($ 10).

"Providence has under its special care children, idiots, and the United States of America." This famed remark, attributed to Lord Bryce (The American Commonwealth), was a Briton's backhanded way of saying that the U.S. was a success. With few such perceptive quips but a relentless, mind-clogging avalanche of scholarly quotes, furrow-browed Columnist (New York Post) Max Lerner, 55, says much the same thing in his physically massive (1,036 pages) survey of America as a Civilization. The unavowed note of irony is that, like many a liberal-leftist prodigal son of the age, Lerner, who regularly scoffed at the U.S. in the '30s and '40s as a house of cards, now treats it as a house of worship.

Five-Goal Man. His book is a kind of flying prayer rug hovering in programmed flight over nearly every aspect of th, U.S. scene--from the birth of the blues to the death of the tycoon, from the flight to the suburb to the fight for collective bargaining, from the 'rise of the immigrant to the decline of premarital virginity. Columnist Lerner (he is also professor of American civilization at Brandeis University) has retained the old, deadening habits of speech--"vested power groups," "acquisitive society," "Barons of Opinion," "cult of property." His book is essentially a gigantic rehash of the works of other writers (in Lerner's lingo, it might be called "an attempt at a reportorial-interpretative, socio-economic synthesis, structurally dialectical and psycho-philosophically neo-eclectic"), but the viewpoints of the other works are neither deepened nor notably clarified. Lerner merely adopts a widely prevalent notion of the typical American as a five-goal man: 1) success, 2) prestige, 3) money, 4) power, 5) security. To achieve these goals, the American has fashioned an "open society" that is mobile, status-conscious rather than class-conscious, welfare-capitalistic, optimistic and pragmatic. According to Lerner, the U.S. has been spared such potential dangers as the tyranny of the majority and the asocial anarchy of rampant individualism through the checks and balances of "pluralism." A diversity of cultural strains --ethnic, regional, religious--has simultaneously enriched and tempered U.S. life. As Lerner sees it, the gentleman's agreement without which the American experiment would have been unworkable was "the agreement to disagree."

To any but neophyte students of the American polity, all of this will bring not the shock of recognition but the snore of superficial assent.

Ectoplasmic Uplift. Lerner deserves credit for recognizing, in disagreement with the Toynbee-esque patternmakers, that the U.S. is not merely a subdivision of Western civilization but, despite acknowledged Western roots, a truly new world under the sun. Yet this vision, like a few others, just barely flickers through the verbal fog banks. Readers who get as far as page 673 will sharply question Lerner's assertion that the U.S. is in a "moral interregnum," distrusting the old gods and uncertainly waiting for new ones, and that (page 947) America is on a descending arc of "inner social and moral vigor." But on the whole, Author Lerner strains so conscientiously to be judicious that he balances every neither with a nor. Sample: "American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. . .it is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Barony." Pursued relentlessly, this mode of thought leaves the reader with the eerie feeling that America is a civilization in which the pluses and minuses cancel each other out except for a vague residue of ectoplasmic uplift, which Lerner calls America's "organic optimism."

The outstanding interpreters of the U.S. scene achieved their insights by imposing a meaning--democratic, economic, social --on the rich diversity of America. Lerner argues merely that the diversity is the meaning, itself an insight but scarcely a major or original one. Trying valiantly to be Olympian, Lerner has suppressed his more obvious former prejudices--except perhaps the prejudice in favor of the strangely arid, yet emotionally pompous sociologist's view of man. The trouble is that little except diligence seems left of Pundit Lerner once the prejudice is gone. His middle-of-the-road stance leaves him not only free of bias but bereft of viewpoint. The middle of the road is a good place to be hit by the traffic of history, but a poor place to gauge its destination.

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