Books: Lerner's Flying Carpet

AMERICA AS A CIVILIZATION (1,036 pp.) —Max Lerner—Simon & Schuster ($ 10).

"Providence has under its special care children, idiots, and the United States of America." This famed remark, attributed to Lord Bryce (The American Commonwealth), was a Briton's backhanded way of saying that the U.S. was a success. With few such perceptive quips but a relentless, mind-clogging avalanche of scholarly quotes, furrow-browed Columnist (New York Post) Max Lerner, 55, says much the same thing in his physically massive (1,036 pages) survey of America as a Civilization. The unavowed note of irony is that, like many a liberal-leftist prodigal son of the age, Lerner, who regularly scoffed at the U.S. in the '30s and '40s as a house of cards, now treats it as a house of worship.

Five-Goal Man. His book is a kind of flying prayer rug hovering in programmed flight over nearly every aspect of th, U.S. scene—from the birth of the blues to the death of the tycoon, from the flight to the suburb to the fight for collective bargaining, from the 'rise of the immigrant to the decline of premarital virginity. Columnist Lerner (he is also professor of American civilization at Brandeis University) has retained the old, deadening habits of speech—"vested power groups," "acquisitive society," "Barons of Opinion," "cult of property." His book is essentially a gigantic rehash of the works of other writers (in Lerner's lingo, it might be called "an attempt at a reportorial-interpretative, socio-economic synthesis, structurally dialectical and psycho-philosophically neo-eclectic"), but the viewpoints of the other works are neither deepened nor notably clarified. Lerner merely adopts a widely prevalent notion of the typical American as a five-goal man: 1) success, 2) prestige, 3) money, 4) power, 5) security. To achieve these goals, the American has fashioned an "open society" that is mobile, status-conscious rather than class-conscious, welfare-capitalistic, optimistic and pragmatic. According to Lerner, the U.S. has been spared such potential dangers as the tyranny of the majority and the asocial anarchy of rampant individualism through the checks and balances of "pluralism." A diversity of cultural strains —ethnic, regional, religious—has simultaneously enriched and tempered U.S. life. As Lerner sees it, the gentleman's agreement without which the American experiment would have been unworkable was "the agreement to disagree."

To any but neophyte students of the American polity, all of this will bring not the shock of recognition but the snore of superficial assent.