American Mythos: Why our Best Efforts to be a Better Nation Fall Short (review)

The book jacket of American Mythos praises this work as "seminal, lucid, magisterial." Such lofty adulations do not conform to my reading of this book. Author of American Mythos Robert Wuthnow, Gerhard Andinger '52 Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton, argues, that we will make America a "better nation" a more pluralistic democracy and a true nation of immigrants, if we open ourselves to newcomers' experience.

America needs a new mind to become a better nation, Wuthnow contends. The nation, he argues, must critically examine the myth that suggests this land of immigrants offers immigrants opportunity and rewards their work with success. Despite a long history of anti-immigrant philosophies and acts, the core archetypical myth that America is the quintessential land where immigrants can realize their dreams has subsisted. It is nothing less than the connective tissue of American consciousness, supplying both a primary identity for Americans and a first criterion for judging newcomers. Indeed, accepting the lives and stories of new immigrants will dispel, according to the author, our narrow conceptions of immigration and make us Americans truer to ourselves. "My purpose, in mentioning ways in which our deeply held cultural assumptions cause us to fall short," the author defines his intention, "is not to suggest that we can solve problems merely by recognizing that things are not as always as good as they seem. Optimism, or at least hope, is itself a significant part of our culture that needs to be preserved. My point is rather to illustrate that reflective democracy requires individual and collective examination of when and how our narratives tell only a part of the story."

Wuthnow's work with Near Eastern immigrants, which he details in the book, suggests that their experience eludes a simple myth of opportunity, chance, and success. They don't realize their dreams. Promises get broken. Work and success severely strain families. And immigrants reluctantly are forced to leave things of great worth behind and cannot easily dispense themselves from an obligation to pass on their own language and ways. By recognizing that the immigration experience cannot be encompassed, in effect, by the Horatio Alger myth, Professor Wuthnow argues, Americans will not only free themselves of from the self-limiting myth, but take a step toward freeing themselves from an engulfing materialism, whose defeat he judges essential for the spiritual renewal of the nation. "The ideal of genuine pluralism holds in part that America should be a place where newcomers can find a home [and enjoy] the rights and privileges of citizenship and that diverse ethnic groups should not have to abandon their distinctive traditions in order to achieve these rights and privileges."

My strong dissent from American Mythos begins at this point with a question about how much attitude and desire should determine public discourse and policy. Can, and should, American society, to be more precise, treat the recent wave of newcomers who have to come to the nation in the last two decades in tens of millions as one group? Should not society distinguish sharply between those that have come permanently and temporarily, legally and not legally, rich and poor, diseased and well, independent and dependent, with and without government support, for reasons of work, freedom, or family ties? Are not the disproportionate numbers and origins of newcomers worthy of differentiation, especially since they come from across the world including Asia, Africa, Europe, Canada, Latin America, and Mexico? Surely society must take account of different cultures: oral, traditional, tribal, pre-national local peasant and tribal cultures versus fragmented, broken and dependent urban cultures, and yet literate, national, consumer, and mass cultures. Obviously, security concerns have made it imperative to identify immigrants with articulated anti-American ideologies and those who might resist assimilation to a free, democratic society. Indeed even if one is willing to take the large...