Back to AtD....Tungaska Event, [in late 700s pages]

[alice wellintown]

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December 11, 2009, "The Tragedy of Happiness,"  Revisiting a
philosopher's ambivalent thoughts about his prosperous adopted
home—America.


For all Santayana's nostalgia for Puritan rigor, though, he did not
much like it. Protestantism for him, even in its purest form, was a
poor foundation on which to build a society—it was arid and
unimaginative, especially when compared with the vastly richer
mystical resources of Roman Catholicism.

But what post-Puritan America encouraged was even worse: a fuddy-duddy
tolerance that ruined religion for everyone, including Catholics. "The
American Catholic is entirely at peace," Santayana chafed. "It is
wonderful how silently, amicably, and happily he lives in a community
whose spirit is profoundly hostile to that of his religion." What
seemed like the most religion-friendly of nations was, for Santayana,
a deeply secular society inoculated against the claims of the sacred.

But Calvinism was only half the American story; there was another
European import that troubled Santayana. This was German Romanticism,
which gave pride of place to the individual's intense experience of
nature. Transcendentalism was its American variant. Santayana admits
that Ralph Waldo Emerson's faith in Americans to remake the world in
their own image found some warrant in the landscape, which offered
bountiful opportunities. But Santayana could not abide the solipsism
of it all: "Nature, for the transcendentalist, is precious because it
is his own work, a mirror in which he looks at himself and says . . .
'What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was such stuff in
me?' "