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The question of "the American identity" is intertwined with another question about what it means to say the world is becoming "Americanized." Our country's two best twentieth-century critics-Martin Heidegger and G. K. Chesterton-differ profoundly on the meaning and significance of this Americanization. For the German Heidegger, the American middle class lives in the thrall of a technological utopianism that is making human beings everywhere ever more displaced or homeless. Our poetic pragmatists, such as David Brooks in his recent Paradise Drive, seem to differ from Heidegger mainly by putting an optimistic American spin on the technological fate that Heidegger abhors.
For the English Catholic Chesterton, however, to Americanize the world would be to make every displaced person throughout the world at home in the American way-which is to say, at home with the truth about being human. For Chesterton, to be a middle-class American is to live in light of the truth about our spiritual existence between the other animals and God. Heidegger and Chesterton are both partly right, as we can see from the evidence that the judicious and conflicted Brooks has presents in his books and New York Times columns. Together, Heidegger and Chesterton can help us account both for the cultural or moral division in American life today and for the genuine distinctiveness of the American identity.
The Inauthentic Homelessness of Our Middle Class
The middle-class American was first and perhaps best described by our best nineteenth-century critic, Alexis de Tocqueville. The bad news is that we Americans have to work. We are caught between being slaves or serfs, who are compelled to work for others, and aristocrats who are free not to work in the name of noble leisure. We are neither below nor above having interests; we're stuck with securing our own existence as individuals in a fundamentally hostile natural environment.1
We are both free for, and stuck with, transforming nature to meet what we believe are our basically material or bodily wants. We have been given nothing from God or nature for which we can be grateful, except for our freedom to add our own labor to nature for our own benefit. Consequently, we have a wholly technological understanding of science, which is the same as having a pragmatic...