Overcoming America / America Overcoming Can We Survive Modernity?

This book argues that the moral disease and political paralysis of America are symptomatic of the fact that America herself has been overtaken by the modern values which she exported to the rest of the world, and that the way out of the current and potentially fatal malaise is to join other societies which are struggling to move beyond the modern '¬ ; though conscious reappropriation of those elements of tradition which have to do with cultivation of the mature human being. In order for this reappropriationto avoid fundamentalism, it must be undertaken in dialogue with persons from other societies who also have come to recognize the unsustainable quality of the modern life-way, and who are committed to parallel processes of reappropriation, as well as to the commonality of dialogue and democracy as the pluralistic ground upon which this becomes possible. This orientation is distinguished not only from fundamentalism, with its dangerous recoil from life in the modern present to assert an absolutized tradition, but also from nihilistic terrorism which reacts to the discovery of modern limitations through the indiscriminate wish to tear it down. The emerging global ethic and spirituality this book supports by way providing resources of articulation and interpretation thus entails an encounter with the real possibility of collapse and death, movement beyond the nihilistic conclusion into affirmation of the gift-quality of life and Nothingness as ineffable wellspring of life, and the ongoing dialogue between traditional and modern values (each valuable, each problematic) through which reliable policy and healthy living become possible.