Apathy, Apocalypse, and the American Jeremiad

Abstract

Scientists announced today they found a cure for apathy, George Carlin tells his audiences. However, they claim no one has shown slightest bit of interest in it. Characterizations of Americans as apathetic, indifferent, or complacent are older than Republic, of course. Before Jeremiah was a bullfrog, jeremiad was a staple of Puritan sermons. When drought or disease descended, or when Indians attacked, ministers found evidence that God had withdrawn his favor from the chosen people because one or more of them had failed to keep His commandments. In times of prosperity, they rang alarm bells, too, indicting inhabitants for forgetting their errand into wilderness. Long after Puritans became Yankees, jeremiad retained its cultural power, invoked by pious prophets and secular reformers, anxious about state of souls or fate of a nation. Whether in support of an embargo on imports from Europe during Revolutionary War, or warnings that Civil War was divine retribution for sins of Americans, North and South, jeremiad became part of civil religion of US. Over course of twentieth century, especially among Americans who did not believe in a transcendent Other, jeremiad became secularized. Appealing to a sense of outrage at injustice, depending on acceptance of standards of right and wrong that could be universally applied, jeremiad reemerged as muckraking of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens, and, in a sense, in some of Marxist literature of 1930s. The secular jeremiad survived century and, as millennium ended, even before NASDAQ nosedive and attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon, jeremiads proliferated, with books under review a mere sampler. To be sure, they competed for space on bookshelves (as jeremiads always have) with works that tapped into economic exuberance, optimism, self-absorption, and smugness of 1990s-George Gilder's Telecosm (2000) and Dinesh D'Souza's The Virtues of Prosperity (2000), for example. But there was a market for narra-