【文章內容簡介】 the car owner can ignore the lack of public transport, he can hardly ignore the decay of services in general. His car needs mechanics, and mechanics grow more expensive and less efficient. The gadgets in the home are cheaper to replace than repair. The more efficiently selfcontained the home seems to be, the more dependent it is on the great impersonal corporations, as well as a diminishing army of servitors. Skills at the lowest level have to be wooed slavishly and exorbitantly rewarded. Plumbers will not e. Nor, at the higher level, will doctors. And doctors and dentists know their scarcity value and behave accordingly .157 Americans are at last realizing that the acquisition of goods is not the whole of life. Consumption, on one level, is turning insipid, especially as the quality of the goods seems to be deteriorating. Planned obsolescence is not conducive to pride in workmanship. On another level, consumption is turning sour . There is a growing guilt about the masses of discarded junk rusting automobiles and refrigerators and washing machines and dehumidifiers that it is uneconomical to recycle. Indestructible plastic hasn39。t even the grace to undergo chemical change . America, the world39。s biggest consumer, is the world39。s biggest polluter. Awareness of this is a kind of redemptive grace, but it has not led to repentance and a revolution in consumer habits. Citizens of Los Angeles are horrified by the daily pall of golden smog, but they don39。t noticeably clamor for a decrease in the number of ownervehicles. There is no worse neurosis than that which derives from a consciousness of guilt and an inability to reform .158 It would be unnecessary for me to list those areas in which thoughtful Americans feel that collapse is ing. It is enough for me to concentrate on education. America has always despised its teachers and, as a consequence, it has been granted the teachers it deserves . The quality of firstgrade education that my son received, in a New Jersey town noted for the excellence of its public schools, could not, I suppose, be faulted on the level of dogged conscientiousness. The teachers worked rigidly from the approved rigidly programed primers. But there seemed to be no spark, no daring, no madness, no readiness to engage the individual child39。s mind as anything other than raw material for statistical reductions. The fear of being unorthodox is rooted in the American teacher39。s soul。 you can be fired for treading the path of experimental enterprises.159 I know that American technical genius, and most of all the moon landing, seems to give the lie to too summary a condemnation of the educational system , but there is more to education than the segmental equipping of the mind. There is that transmission of the value of the past as a force still miraculously fertile and moving mostly absent from American education at all levels.1510 Of course, America was built on a rejection of the past. Even the basic Christianity which was brought to the continent in 1620 was of a novel and bizarre kind . And now America, filling in the vacuum left by the liquefied British Empire, has the task of showing the best thing to the rest of the world. The best thing can only be moneymaking and consumption for its own sake. In the name of this ghastly creed the jungle must be defoliated .1511 No wonder thoughtful Americans feel guilty and want to take all the blame they can find. What do Europeans really think of us? is a mon question at parties. The expected answer is: They think you39。re a load of decadent, grosslipped, potbellied, callous, overbearing neoimperialists. But the fact is that such an answer, however much desired, would not be an honest one. Europeans think more highly of Americans now than they ever did. Let me explain why.1512 When Europe had sunk to the level of sewer, America became the golden dream, the Eden where innocence could be recovered . Original sin was the monopoly of that dirty continent over there. In America, progress was possible, and the wrongs mitted against the Indians, the wildlife, the land itself, could be explained away in terms of the rational control of environment necessary for the building of a New Jerusalem. Morally there were only right and wrong。 evil had no place in America.1513 At last, with the Vietnam War, Americans are beginning to realize that they are subject to original sin as much as Europeans are. Some things the massive crime figures, for instance can now be explained only in terms of absolute evil. America is no longer Europe39。s daughter nor her rich stepmother。 she is Europe39。s sister。 The agony that America is undergoing is not to be associated with breakdown as much as with the parturition of selfknowledge. 1514 It has been assumed that the youth of America has been in the vanguard of the discovery of both the disease and the cure. The various escapist movements, however, have mitted the gross error of assuming that original sin rested with their elders, their rulers, and that they themselves could manifest their essential innocence by building little neoEdens. The drug culture could confirm that the paradisal vision was available to all who sought it. But instant ecstasy has to be purchased, like any other modity, and, in economic terms, that passive life involves parasitism. Practically all of the crime I encountered in New York was a preying of the opiumeaters on the working munity. There has to be the snake in paradise. You can39。t escape the heritage of human evil by building munes, usually on an agronomic ignorance that does violence to life . The American young are wellmeaning but misguided, and must not themselves be taken as guides.1515 The guides, as always, lie among the writers and artists. And Americans ought to note that, however things may seem to be falling apart, arts and the humane scholarship are flourishing here. I39。m not suggesting that writers and artists have the task of finding a