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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.