David Brooks penned an interesting column on an issue I’ve been pondering extensively in recent weeks. The thought is on America’s lack of narrative. The issue goes something like this: after America’s scrappy rise to the top from its frontier-founding through the 19th and 20th centuries, World War 1, the Depression, World War II, the Cold War–after all these things ran their course, the national psyche, now mostly-free from mortal fear of distant enemies and aware of its status atop the world stage, began to dissolve.

The realization of the Internet and progression of niche entertainment only increased the compartmentalization–a body can now spend the entirety of their connected day in a small social network with a host of television stations, magazines, blogs, forums, and a million budding social networking sites to bind them and shield them from the other groups: cat lovers of Worcester, bagpipe enthusiasts against the public option, you name it–to each their own, and as they usually choose, themselves alone.

Traditional conservative-types like Brooks (and George Will) find this distressing. The continued cohesion of a community depends upon shared values, rituals, and stories. The end of that cohesion, as with any political philosophy, is prosperity and progress. And so this compartmentalization is in its essence anathema to the America that a Brooks-Will conservative knows.

At first, they were lucky. As the nation grew larger, more diverse, and a number of other unity-splitting things, it had wars (however tragic) to keep Americans together, on a common path despite the growing divides between them. But of course, once the wars ended it was, they would argue, a continual progression apart over the next two decades. The attacks of 11 September certainly provided no respite and perhaps even exacerbated the trend, as bigotry against Muslims increased and limitless ammunition was handed to the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq, torture prisoners, and so on. Political polarization of foreign policy, an issue once given consensus as recently as the first Gulf War and perhaps the last concrete manifestation of American unity, was now gone.

Enter David Brooks, November 16 2009, arguing that why, as President Obama visits China, many Americans feel a vague unease about the future:

It is not only China’s economic growth rate that produces this anxiety. The deeper issue is spiritual. The Chinese, though members of a famously old civilization, seem to possess some of the vigor that once defined the U.S. The Chinese are now an astonishingly optimistic people. Eighty-six percent of Chinese believe their country is headed in the right direction, compared with 37 percent of Americans.

The Cultural Revolution seems to have produced among the Chinese the same sort of manic drive that the pioneer and immigrant experiences produced among the Americans. The people who endured Mao’s horror have seen the worst life has to offer and are now driven to build some secure footing. At the same time, they and their children seem inflamed by the experience of living through so much progress so quickly.

The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.

Looking at the typical scene of a construction-filled Chinese horizon, Brooks concludes, “It becomes obvious by comparison just how far the U.S. has drifted from its normal future centered orientation and how much this rankles”.

The American reader is surely now depressed. Brooks offers little solace: general policy prescriptions for increased research, education, and innovation-spurring measures. But in the same breath he acknowledges the difficulty, in part due to the dissolving-fallout, of passing anything substantive in the Congress.

But the angst pangs, will pang, dully and again until the national psyche is somehow called by “some leader [to] induce the country to salivate for the future again”. America certainly has its opportunities: the prospect of fiscal ruin, climate change, and our standing as a country are about as impelling of causes as they come. America has elected to the presidency perhaps the only man who can make good on them.

What, then, is missing?

Let’s hope the answer comes in time, and soon.

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