The 2003-2004 Book In Common for California State University, Chico will be “The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders,” by Jacob Needleman.

The Book in Common is a CSU, Chico program where a particular book is read and studied in a number of classes across different disciplines and departments over the course of an academic year.

Jacob Needleman is a philosopher and a member of the faculty at San Francisco State. His previous books have explored the philosophical and spiritual aspects of contemporary life. “The American Soul” constitutes Needleman’s first foray into the history of the United States, and particularly the American incarnation of democracy and how that notion and the rebellion that made it actual were inspired by the felt need for a free inner life of spirituality and moral purpose.

“The American Soul” was completed prior to terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, but then revised before publication last year. The intervening time has seen the further emergence of the United States as the singular military, economic, political and cultural power. The philosophical crisis of the nation, Needleman urges, has to do with rekindling the sense of moral and spiritual purpose that instigated its origin. Losing sight of those values renders America empty, asleep, and lost of its soul, he writes.

“An empty America cannot endure,” Needleman argues. “It will not survive; it may keep its name and armies for a while, it may keep its Constitution and its laws and forms of government, it may keep its symbolic heroes, it may remain a place where people wish to survive physically and economically; but without the inner resonance of its ideals and values, without the olive branch in its eagle claws-that is, without the primacy of the goal of peace, America is sure to go nowhere.”

Needleman’s conclusion: There isn’t any more appropriate time than now to reflect upon what America means.

Needleman’s search finds substance for the meaning of the American soul in the nation’s heroes, myths, legacies, writers and thinkers: George Washington, Benjamin

Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the 18th Century utopian community of Ephrata in eastern Pennsylvania, the Iroquois myth of creation, the Iroquois Confederacy, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.

What Jefferson can pose for us “seekers of truth and moral authority” is a vision of “a society that provides the freedom and welfare necessary to live the life of ordinary men and women, comprising both their material and spiritual needs,” Needleman writes. This simple life, though, “requires the creation of a community of conscience, from within which can be generated the ideals, the knowledge, and above all, the new men and women who can bring light to the whole of society.”

In stark contrast to the ideals and endurance of the American soul are the great crimes of America: the eradication of the culture and civilization of American Indians, slavery and racism. These crimes, Needleman says, bespeak a nation that nevertheless is fully capable of losing its soul, whose conscience can-in the words of Douglass-fall asleep and succumb to the American illusion. The illusion of American ideals that easily masks its genuine soul is found in the assumption that regardless of its deeds and circumstances America nevertheless automatically always stands for freedom and humanity.

“Uniquely clear and astonishing is the moral contradiction of a nation founded so brilliantly on the ideals of freedom and its actions of brutality and oppression,” writes Needleman. The magnitude of those crimes imbues the American story with the “lightning bolt of the revelation that while striving outwardly to eradicate injustice, it is imperative that humanity strive inwardly to feel the sorrow of its own capacity for evil.”

The American illusion was brought to critical reflection nationwide with the conclusion of the Vietnam War, Needleman points out. The nation continues to experience momentous points in its history when-post-Vietnam, post-Sept. 11 or post-Iraq-its sense of its purpose and image as a nation undergoes profound change. But it is paradoxically just those periods of passage that Needleman finds profoundly propitious for reflection and renewal: “The future is another word for the soul. And the only hope for humanity is in the growth of the soul. Such is the message of the teachings of wisdom that gave original light to the ideals of the American nation,” he writes.

The Book In Common was initiated in fall 1998, when a committee was formed and charged by Scott McNall, provost and vice president for academic affairs, to develop a common reading experience for the entering freshman class of 2000. Previous annual selections for Book In Common have been “The Moon by Whale Light and Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales,” by Diane Ackerman, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” by Anne Fadiman and “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal,” by Eric Schlosser.

Jacob Needleman’s “The American Soul” has been selected with the assurance in advance that faculty in sufficient number will adopt it for use in courses, and so a large number of students in next year’s freshman class will encounter the book integrated in a course of instruction. The diverse elements and topics of the book render it amenable to adoption by faculty teaching many diverse courses enrolling freshmen and other students.

“Though Needleman has clear views on American society and history, those views do not easily collapse onto a single point in the spectrum of contemporary political ideology,” said Dennis Rothermel, interim vice provost for academic affairs and dean of undergraduate education. “Moreover, as a philosopher, Needleman is inspired to provide a context for raising issues that entice and demand further discussion and argument, and from the broadest inclusion of vantage-points. These qualities will engender this book with extraordinary potential for defining a common experience in reading, study, reflection, discussion and debate for next year’s freshman class,” said Rothermel.

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