Unlike the pastoral culture it was intended to replace, the new therapeutic machinery was to be compulsory rather than voluntary, national rather than local, secular rather than spiritual, rigidly bureaucratic rather than idiosyncratically flexible. The old pastoral culture was a product not merely of the religious sensibility of the old Europeans but of their aesthetic finesse: They used art and especially music to create desirable patterns of order in everyday life. (Art and music, the Greeks believed, are more effective than laws in the building of cities — an insight that we in our rage for rule-making have forgotten.) The old pastoral culture of the West appealed to the imagination, for it was saturated with myth and deeply indebted to the poets. The new redemptive machinery, by contrast, was sterile and unimaginative: It said nothing to the soul. Such was the viper the northern sages nourished in their bosoms. They called it socialism.
Republican wonks may complain that European-style socialism is bad economics, but, really, the root fear is that the wrong political economy can wreck a culture. And it's not just Republicans who think that America has an exceptional, and exceptionally good, culture -- whether as a consequence of providence or, as left nationalist Richard Rorty would have it, contingency. Rorty's muscular defense of left Americanism emphasizes the cultural superiority of organic pragmatism to the Northern European model, which arbitrarily applies abstract rationalism to the structuring of social life. Rorty recognized, almost alone among his class of thinkers, that no amount of effort to correspond policy to society will substitute for the 'right' social poetry -- 'right' meaning, in his pragmatist idiom, the poetry with the right fit, the poetry that moves, touches, and inspires people to achieve new possibilities that cohere with one other peacefully and fruitfully.
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