According to Pascal, the greatness of man is in his misery, and the restless, workholic Americans are clearly miserable in the absence of God. Such restlessness, Tocqueville observes, is not new to the world. What’s unprecedented is that a whole people is restless. America is evidence that the Christians are right and the classical philosophers are wrong about the human soul. Most human beings don’t live trapped in some "cave" oblivious to the truth about the human condition. The Americans all display the spiritual longing that the aristocrats and their philosophers believed was possible only for a privileged few. Although in many ways disoriented and confused about who they are, our bourgeois bohemians display greatness uncharacteristic of members of the other species. (Carl Scott has a quite a different and very profound take on Alexis, and I hope he will share with us here.)
