A Prospectus/Preamble to Mohan Limaye's Course on The American Dream

Reimagining the United States: Reshaping the American Dream

A Course Prospectus or “Preamble”

(Drafted in 2009)

Mohan R. Limaye, Ph. D.

Most of us will agree that, over the years, the concept of the American Dream has had some positive results in terms of people’s dynamism and creativity leading to progress for the United States.  Over many decades, the American Dream has inspired those born here as well as those arriving here as immigrants to achieve for themselves and their children great material success.  For the immigrant, the idea of the American Dream may still evoke expressions such as “from rags to riches”, “from a log cabin to the White House” and “the sky is the limit.”

This course revolves around a proposition that, though the idea of the American Dream has had substance and merit, the concept needs urgent reshaping today.  The land of unlimited opportunity may be experiencing some dimming.  The ills troubling our nation today, from a severe economic downturn and environmental degradation to the ever more expensive healthcare, from the soaring public and private debt to the war of attrition in Afghanistan, all seem to me to be the consequences of the excesses of the American Dream. 

Varying interpretations of what the American Dream means have varying axiomatic bases.  However, in my judgment, the two most influential of the several premises the American Dream seems to be predicated on are of dubious validity: one, the earth’s resources are infinite and, two, the U.S. will always dominate the world.  Regarding the first premise, many Americans’ dominant cultural predilection for limitless, for ever more, material objects seems to imply a belief that the earth can sustain all this extravagance.   “The pursuit of Happiness” may have led to limitless greed and selfishness.  However, within the life span of one individual, his/her idea of the American Dream may change – from acquisition to “downsizing”, from intense attachment to gradual detachment from “things”, from stuff. 

 Some people believe that advances in science and technology will resolve what seem to be insurmountable obstacles to progress, as they have done in the past –obstacles, such as the demand for things exceeding their supply.  For instance, if we run out of space on this earth we will colonize other planets.  However, to me, the real crux of the issue at any given moment in time or in any country (or on any planet) is the distribution of available resources.  The challenge for all societies over the centuries has always been to strike a happy balance, a golden mean, between the uniquely capitalistic characteristics of innovation and individual incentive, on the one hand, and the intrinsically socialistic or humanitarian impulse toward equity, fairness and compassion, on the other.  The participants in the class may want to discuss these issues. 

One can make a case that in earlier times, before the phrase “the American Dream” came into existence, the Founding Fathers dreamed of establishing a nation where the basic freedoms of religion, speech, and conscience -- like those enshrined in the Bill of Rights -- would be preserved.  Then in later times, once these freedoms seemed to be guaranteed, a majority of Americans began thinking of, say, owning a home as an essential part of the American Dream.  After all, the original phrase contained “Life, Liberty, and Property”; “Pursuit of Happiness” was a revision.  On the other hand, the class would also want to look at the non-materialistic aspect of the American Dream, its more “spiritual” aspect. 

As the students study the evolution of this concept of the American Dream, they will also need to look at the U.S. from outside in and not just from inside in.  They will need to ask some probing questions: Do we, indeed, need to change our view of the self as well as our view of the other?  Do we need to realize that a post-American century has dawned?  The students will be able to explore such issues in their readings for the class.  They will also learn about different attitudes and perspectives people in other countries have as far as their “dreams” are concerned.  The United Nations’ rankings of countries on various criteria of “livability” could be a starting point.

The second premise or assumption may have for its basis an apparently incurable obsession of many Americans to be the single Superpower.  From James Monroe to Teddy Roosevelt, the march of the American Dream went hand in hand with doctrines like the “Manifest Destiny” and with territorial expansion.  Even in recent times, one imperial addiction, meddlesomeness, does not seem to have cooled down.  Under the new administration, it seems, only the rhetoric of U.S. foreign policy has changed, not the substance.  To get out of our present troubles, we have to reexamine the foreign-policy aspect of the American Dream and, at the least, to modify it.  

I also suggest we should open up in this class a discussion of the impact of the Founding Fathers’ thinking (and the ideas of other figures of the so-called Age of Enlightenment) on the successive generations of Americans.  The Founders of the Republic warned against involvement in European affairs.  Indeed, some may argue, they were rather isolationists, at least in principle.  But, later on, in subsequent decades, the U.S. became more and more interventionist.  In fact, Newt Gingrich recently went on blithely suggesting (on the eve of the Republican Primaries there) that we should effect a regime change in Cuba.  And some Americans can hardly wait to start hostilities with Iran.

In our search for where our values and belief systems have come from, we will benefit from reading and reflecting on some primary sources like the Declaration and the Constitution.  We need to take an objective (and, maybe, not a reverential) look to determine whether the Founding Fathers carried in them, ideologically, the seeds of territorial expansionism (Certainly, they wanted to push into the Indian/native American territory).  In addition, maximum exploitation of nature was the creed of the age.  Both of these “values” were, in my judgment, important ingredients in the shaping of the American Dream and of our discourse about it even today.