Publication date:
04 November 2011Length of book:
248 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739171400
In Overcoming America / America Overcoming, Stephen Rowe shows how the moral disease and political paralysis that plague 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. He points to a way out of this current and potentially fatal malaise: join other societies which are also struggling to move beyond the modern and consciously reappropriate those elements of tradition which have to do with cultivation of the mature human being. To avoid fundamentalism, Rowe discusses how this reappropriation must be undertaken in dialogue with those who also have come to recognize the unsustainable quality of the modern life, and who have been able to live beyond the nihilistic wish to tear it down. This book supports the call for an emerging global ethic and spirituality, providing resources of articulation and interpretation that allow for an ongoing dialogue between traditional and modern values—both worthy and problematic in their own ways—through which reliable policy and healthy living become possible.
Stephen Rowe is my favorite commentator on American culture, doing so with great nuance. In Overcoming America he has sought the deepest level of the malaise gripping our nation and found it in the dominant 'worldview.' The book arises from the richness of Rowe’s own dialogical life-experience, especially with American liberal education and the revival of traditional Chinese culture.