AmericaOne should always be wary of terms which evoke universal applause. "Community", "dynamic", "modernisation" and "David Beckham" might serve as examples.
The ultimate hurrah word, however, is "imagination", which we are all in favour of, just as we are all opposed to sin. Nobody would brand themselves unimaginative, just as nobody would call themselves Fatso or Frogface. Everyone is an acolyte of the imagination, just as everyone is a champion of world peace, which is what makes both notions so resoundingly vacuous. Anything on which we all spontaneously agree is bound to be mildly suspect, not least when almost every enlightened idea in history was resisted tooth and claw at the time by a scandalised majority.
In fact, the imagination is by no means as innocent a concept as Romantics such as Curtis White seem to suppose. It became fashionable from the mid-18th century onwards, when it began to seem the only way of gaining access to the inner lives of others. Since men and women were now defined as solitary creatures whose experience was private to themselves, a faculty was needed which would allow them to melt sympathetically into each other's minds; and the imagination stepped obediently into the breach. Without such intuitive fellow-feeling, society would fall apart, and the bankers and landowners along with it.
The imagination, then, rose to power partly to compensate for the privatisation of human experience in a middle-class world. It was a magnificent solution to an entirely false problem. It also helped in its surreptitious way to legitimate the inequalities of that world. If you were too poor or hard-worked to explore the markets of Marrakesh, you could always explore them vicariously through the power of the imagination, and so be reconciled to your situation. Before long, we were being told that possessing something in the imagination was even richer than possessing it in reality. Ill-starred wretches get to lunch at the Ivy and sail down the Nile, while the really fortunate ones among us stay at home and experience all this in imaginary terms.
There is, to be sure, much to be said for this splendid human faculty. But those like Curtis White, who celebrate it uncritically while polemicising against the uncritical nature of American culture, clearly have a problem.
White believes that what is needed by the Middle Mind - his rather fuzzy phrase for everyday US culture - is a stiff dose of artistic imagination and intellectual originality. Like several of his propositions, this is both true and tedious. It is true because Rush Limbaugh is indeed not quite of Einsteinian stature when it comes to intellectual innovation. It is tedious because it is hard to see how any rational animal could disagree.
It is easy to disagree, on the other hand, with White's stale Romantic assumption that the imagination is an inherently radical, destabilising force. Wordsworth was a champion of both the creative imagination and capital punishment. The imagination is by no means always subversive. Nor is it easy to see how thinking for yourself, a pursuit which White urges on his conformist compatriots, is going to unseat the executives of Exxon. For that, a spot of political analysis and action is necessary. But White, like all Romantic individualists, believes that political ideology is the enemy of the imagination. So if he is opposed to Haliburton and Oliver North, he is equally sceptical about the kind of disciplined theory and action which might help to do something to dislodge them. He speaks instead, in his vapidly moralising style, about being "free to create one's own world" - a typically American solution to a typically American problem. The Middle Mind, an intensely parochial book, cannot distance its own culture enough to recognise that a brand of free-booting spiritual individualism has always gone hand in hand in the US with its more brutally materialist kind of individualism.
The Middle Mind takes some well-aimed swipes at the solemn absurdities of US cultural studies, and its political heart is in the right place. But if it denounces American culture, it also unwittingly reflects it. It is a haphazardly-stocked supermarket of a study, a ragbag of bits and pieces (Seinfeld, Derrida, Jimi Hendrix, Harold Bloom) without much depth or rigour. Its polemic against American culture is couched from time to time in the kind of slack, folksy style which is the US intellectual's linguistic equivalent of wearing a baseball cap. Full of racy "oh my" exclamations and cack-handed attempts at wit, White's prose style at its thinnest is a symptom of the brittle culture his book laments.
It is nowadays almost impossible to find in the United States a prose which is both easy and elegant, stylish and vernacular.
Even so, in the dark age of Bush and Cheney, one wishes the book all the success that a less imperfect polemic would deserve.
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His latest book is After Theory
The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves By Curtis White Allen Lane, 205 pp. £ 12.99