America: Going, Going, Gone?

THE RECOVERY OF CONFIDENCE by John W. Gardner. 189 pages. Norton. $5.00.

THE AGE OF AQUARIUS by William Braden. 306 pages. Quadrangle. $7.95.

THE PURSUIT OF LONELINESS by Philip Slater. 154 pages. Beacon Press. $7.50.

THE END OF THE AMERICAN ERA by Andrew Hacker. 239 pages. Afheneum. $6.50.

"The youth of America is their oldest tradition," said Oscar Wilde. "It has been going on now for 300 years." The assumption that the U.S. is a young country has, in fact, been a national premise for hope and the future -an adrenalin charge of optimism no matter what the crisis. Now, suddenly, without even the mixed blessing of a transitional middle age, a question has been raised: Is America's youthful "experiment" all but finished?

The possibility that America has reached its end time haunts the authors of three of these exercises in national self-appraisal. The fourth assumes that an American doomsday is a distinct probability. In former times of trouble, even America's severest critics usually shared the notion that the disappointing child they were shaking heads over was still a bouncing specimen; there was plenty of time to reform its ways. Now, little time seems left. All these skilled critics not only reckon on the chance of an American apocalypse; they simply take for granted that most Americans are living with the shadow of this new apprehension. Read together, their examinations are an extraordinary documentary of America's changing attitude toward itself. Historical change is what these books are ostensibly about; the change of heart the authors themselves illustrate may prove to be the most significant change of all.

Lost Elan. John W. Gardner's essay is the bridge book to the past. It comes closest to the old American liberal attitude of decent expectation. Yet the title clearly implies that a vital national elan has been lost -and must be found again before the American dream may be further pursued. In fact, the slightly retreating titles of Mr. Gardner's previous books reflect the pressure of the times. From the absolute of Excellence (1961) he has strategically withdrawn to Self-Renewal (1964), No Easy Victories (1968), and now The Recovery of Confidence.

Gardner takes a precautionary peep or two at Armageddon, and he says: "We are in trouble as a species." As one responsible man of good will to another, he drops warnings: "This free society begins with us. It mustn't end with us." But his emphasis lies with the affirmative, albeit a beleaguered affirmative: "We still have a choice."

In the substantive sections of his book, Gardner takes up the national crises as separate problems conventionally defined -housing, transportation, environment, consumer protection. He has the faith of a reformer that the country can solve these difficulties within the tradition if only it can summon up the will -roll up its sleeves and do it: "Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess."

Gardner is a thoughtful, honorable leader who knows -and says -that peopie must hope in order to act. But his exhortations now have a little of the artificiality of cheerleading. They seem to have been designed for earlier and lesser crises. "Hope is out of style," he writes in rueful recognition of the new American climate.

Journalist William Braden, by contrast, is a kind of intellectual tourist guide, busing his readers through the suburbs of the American mind, 1970. On your far left, ladies and gentlemen, are the Yippies . .

Whenever he comes to an intellectual celebrity, Braden, an indefatigable interviewer, jumps out of the bus and, in effect, braces him. What's wrong with America? The mike is yours, Erik (Identity Crisis) Erikson, or Bruno (The Children of the Dream) Bettelheim, or Christopher (The Agony of the American Left) Lasch, or Kenneth (Young Radicals) Keniston.

As Braden sums up the returns, Americans have been done in by technology. They have become producers and consumers first, people second. "The instrumentalization of things" has led to "the instrumentalization of man." Man has become the ultimate object of his own manipulation. He is in danger of engineering his own humanity out of existence: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

No rolling up of sleeves in the Gardner spirit will do for Braden. What Gardner takes to be the problems -racism, poverty amid affluence, and so on -Braden takes to be simply the symptoms of a sick society. Like Gardner, he wants to believe that America can be saved from its apocalypse, and all his interviews, all his quick-tour surveys are really devoted to looking into ways and means.

Will the young supply the spark for regeneration? Alas, the young, Braden fears, may be too obsessed with lifestyle and too hedonistic -just a new kind of market for technology to manipulate. "Consumers of enjoyment," to quote Lasch.

Will the blacks be the saving remnant? Can they join white America, in James Baldwin's words, to "achieve our country, and change the history of the world?" With cautious romanticism, Braden is half tempted to think so, because, like Baldwin, but perhaps incorrectly, he assumes that the black has not been conned by the myths of white America -above all, by the "ideology of maximum production and maximum consumption." At any rate, Braden, an amateur theologian (The Private Sea), concludes that nothing short of a religious conversion can save America. Technology is beyond reversal -"that which can be done must be done" is the law of applied science. But the country's attitude toward technology can perhaps be changed. The U.S. could, for instance, develop a proper distrust for the "gospel of growth." Such a change in attitude could put human welfare ahead of gross national product.

Braden ends up, like John Gardner, with unfashionable expressions of hope, quoting the German theologian Jiirgen Moltmann's The Theology of Hope. If the present looks grim, well, maybe -just maybe -there's the future. He settles for the progressive slogan, "Say no to the given and yes to the new." He gambles, as a humanist, that if runaway technology can be slowed down, it will somehow come out evolution rather than revolution.

Killing and Competing. Philip Slater, chairman of the department of sociology at Brandeis University, agrees with Braden on the baneful effects of technology. But on the gloom-doom scale, Slater is about as far on the dark side of Braden as Braden is of Gardner. Like the new breed of revisionist historians (TIME, Feb. 2), Slater, in fact, is not sure whether America ever was all that good. From the Pilgrims on, he says American immigrants consisted of "people who were not personally successful in confronting the social conditions obtaining in their mother country." No wonder that ever since, the national pattern of facing life has largely involved "escaping, evading, and avoiding."

Like Braden, Slater is indignant at the poor emotional quality of American lives. As a result of "mindless and unremitting productivity," he says, "it is only in mutilated form that the sexual impulse can exist in America." Americans buy and sell instead of making love. Though Slater too often lapses into the new rhetoric of rage, he is perceptive and provocative when analyzing American do-it-yourselfism and even the much-prized American family as devices that ensure further loneliness and isolation.

Americans in general like to think of themselves as community-minded; Slater decides that individualism, American-style, means "killing and competing." Like Braden, and unlike Gardner, he calls for a change of values. His preference: "cooperating and enjoying." Down with self-reliance, up with the Utopian community.

What the other Jeremiahs warn against, Andrew Hacker, professor of government at Cornell, states as accomplished fact: "The United States has been embarked on its decline since the closing days of the Second World War." Like Braden and Slater, Hacker lays substantial blame upon technology; unlike the other two, he is a thoroughgoing determinist.

We cannot choose policy, he argues. We cannot even choose to consent to it. For technology not only runs our lives, it also subtly changes our ethics and even our characters in such a way that we cannot resist it. Hacker holds that thanks to our material success, for instance, "a willingness to sacrifice is no longer in the American character." And "what was once a nation has become simply an agglomeration of self-concerned individuals" -200 million egos, as he scathingly captions one chapter. We are in "a stage of moral enervation," says Hacker. We are "no longer capable of being a great power" because "we lack the will."

Beyond Gardner's political activism, beyond Braden's marginal theology of hope, beyond Slater's long-shot utopianism, Hacker sits like an American Spengler, waiting for the fall of practically everything. Yet of the four, his accounting of American history is the most knowledgeable, his judgments on it the most just.

He does not simply sermonize about the quality of American life. (This is Slater's particular flaw.) In his chapter on "Corporate America," for example, Hacker depicts, more like a novelist than a political scientist, exactly how the machinery of technology dictates the shape of bureaucratic government, and how that machinery, in turn, frustrates the men of good intent, who only imagine they are at the controls. Then, in a biting but witty chapter called "Domestic Dissonance," he dramatizes how the character of public experience carries over into the home. The laissez-faire economy of the past he relates easily to what he describes as the laissez-faire American marriage of the present. ("One of man's earliest accomplishments," he observes in a sentence that will please feminists, "was inventing the arrangement whereby the opinions and energies of half the population could be carefully controlled.")

Premature Hysteria. By seeing American history in a special perspective, Hacker perceives the tragedy of a nation divided between its transcendent dream of itself and its present quality and affluence. If America's rewards are turning into a kind of curse, Hacker understands that it is because the country committed itself with a large measure of idealism to salvation by good works -a not unreasonable goal until the machine came along to make a parody of it.

The question remains, is it time for Hacker -or anyone -to write the country off? It may be too late to trot out again the "We are a young country" routine. But there is also a premature hysteria to the new-style despair, as if American opinion were going from polarized optimism to polarized pessimism -from the foolish complacence of thinking we were the best to the equally foolish self-contempt of accepting that we are the worst.

One of Slater's sharpest points is that, in time of partisanship and political transition, the moderate center becomes an embarrassing position. Instead of serving as a meeting ground for extremes, it turns into a no man's land, where men and ideas are caught in a withering crossfire. Yet it is precisely in a time of transition that all the qualities usually associated with the center -patience, good temper, a skeptical willingness to wait and see -become more valuable because they are so scarce.

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