American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short

Extract

American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short. By Robert Wuthnow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 298p. $29.95.

Robert Wuthnow's insightful book examines the stories that we Americans like to believe about ourselves, not so much for the purpose of discovering whether those stories are true—though he presents plenty of evidence to show both truth and falsity in them—as for the sake of showing what the United States needs to become a better nation. The falsity in those “narratives” makes our perceptions of ourselves biased (p. 1), he argues; but because they function at the level of “deep meaning” behind our collective thinking (p. 25), we rarely question their validity. Such questioning should be the work of “reflective democracy” (p. 3), a combination of opinions from experts and the masses. Since the United States is a country of immigrants, Wuthnow relies on interviews with “new immigrant elites because they provide a particularly interesting informational context in which to examine ideas about cultural renewal” (p. 9). It stands to reason that elites will be more interesting than the masses, but is Wuthnow's sample a good way to gauge the prospects for democracy? “Cultural renewal” involves families, schools, and civic associations, but it is not always clear what he means by culture. At times he gives the word an entirely intellectual meaning (e.g., “basic values and … taken-for-granted understandings of what it means to be good people and to live responsibly in a good society” [p. 14]).