Apathy, Apocalypse, and the American Jeremiad

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America By Barbara Ehrenreich Henry Holt, 2001

The Twilight of American Culture By Morris Berman W. W. Norton, 2000

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy By Russell Jacoby Basic Books, 1999

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things By Barry Glassner Basic Books, 1999

The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel SoAlone By Laura Pappano Rutgers University Press, 2001

"Scientists announced today they found a cure for apathy," George Carlin tells his audiences. "However, they claim no one has shown the slightest bit of interest in it."

Characterizations of Americans as apathetic, indifferent, or complacent are older than the Republic, of course. Before Jeremiah was a bullfrog, the jeremiad was a staple of Puritan sermons. When drought or disease descended, or when Indians attacked, ministers found evidence that God had withdrawn his favor from "the chosen people" because one or more of them had failed to keep His commandments. In times of prosperity, they rang the alarm bells, too, indicting the inhabitants for forgetting their "errand into the wilderness." Long after Puritans became Yankees, the jeremiad retained its cultural power, invoked by pious prophets and secular reformers, anxious about the state of souls or the fate of a nation. Whether in support of an embargo on imports from Europe during the Revolutionary War, or warnings that the Civil War was divine retribution for the sins of Americans, North and South, the jeremiad became part of the civil religion of the US.

Over the course of the twentieth century, especially among Americans who did not believe in a transcendent Other, the jeremiad became secularized. Appealing to a sense of outrage at injustice, depending on acceptance of standards of right and wrong that could be universally applied, the jeremiad reemerged as the muckraking of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens, and, in a sense, in some of the Marxist literature of the 1930s.

The secular jeremiad survived the century and, as the millennium ended, even before the NASDAQ nosedive and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, jeremiads proliferated, with the books under review a mere sampler. To be sure, they competed for space on the bookshelves (as jeremiads always have) with works that tapped into the economic exuberance, optimism, self-absorption, and smugness of the 1990s—George Gilder's Telecosm (2000) and Dinesh D'Souza's The Virtues of Prosperity (2000), for example. But there was a market for narratives of prosperity, spiritual decline, and cultural decadence. Literate Americans, as well as moviegoers, it seems, still get a rush when they are whipped for their indifference and warned of approaching apocalypse.

Surprisingly, the events of September 11 do not make these books appear prescient. As of this writing, the "war against terrorism" has increased the anxiety of Americans about their own personal safety and that of their families. But discussion of anthrax, the Axis of Evil, dirty bombs, and "weapons of mass destruction" has not made Americans appreciably more apocalyptic. With one long, dark, doubting century behind them, and another under way, the secular jeremiahs have lost their faith in retribution and redemption for a people or a nation. As the books under review suggest, they continue to write trenchant analyses of cultural and social crises. Unable to will themselves, let alone their audiences, even their post-September 11 audiences, into a belief that would take individuals outside of themselves, or make a prediction or threat about the future that seems credible, the jeremiahs seem prisoners of the self-absorption, apathy, and cynicism they seek to overcome.

Nickel and Dimed is a journey to "the dark side of the boom." Citing an Economic Policy Institute estimate that a "living wage" for an adult with two children is $30,000 a year or $14 an hour, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that with 60% of working Americans earning less than that, low wages, as much or more...