peals to ascetic and scholarly ideals andnthe liberal culture’s hedonism, Epsteinnnotes a thematic continuity betweennthem. They all attack the allegedly dehumanizingneffect of men’s ceaselessnstriving for worldly advancement andnsingle out their own country for specialnblame. Because of a success fixation,nAmericans, it is claimed, have ignorednhigher cultural values and have lostnsight of any nobler end beyond “makingnit.” Epstein concedes the force of thesenarguments but also shows what moralnproblems have attended modern America’snabandonment of ambition as annideal. Our commercial and political leadersnhave grown embarrassed aboutnmoney and power. They spend much ofntheir time apologizing to others whilensupporting their own declared enemies.nFamilies of established wealth underwritenthe cost of revolutionary agitationnand subsidize their countercultural detractors.nEven those who remain explicitlynambitious are often morally lessnadmirable than earlier generations ofnself-made men. What survived of thenolder religious (Victorian) work ethicnin Carnegie and Rockefeller has by nownbeen badly eroded. Those who strivenafter money do so only to enjoy it andnnot to fulfill a God-given calling, evennone stripped of its older theologicalncontext.nEpstein describes a flawed ideal (ambition)nbeing replaced by self-hate in anmoral vacuum. No eulogies to capitalistnproductiveness or to material progressncan dislodge the problem here posed.nA moral difficulty bedevils us as a modernnnation and goes back to what ournfounding fathers failed adequately tonaddress: the social-ethical dimension ofnour national life. The Federalist Papers,nproduced by Madison and Hamilton inndefense of a newly framed constitution,nviewed religious institutions primarilynas mutually restraining forces. The “extendednrepublic” which they hoped tonbuild depended upon having churchesnand social institutions function withinna system of countervailing influences.nNot virtue and justice, but freedom andnlOinChronicles of Culturenprosperity within a federal framework,nwere the paramount values to whichnour national founders appealed. Thatnthey gave short shrift in their constitutionalnarguments to public virtue andnthe moral requirements of citizenshipnmay be hard to hold against them. MostnAmericans were then churched and stillnliving in what, by modern standards,nwere tightly knit communities. Appealsnto doctrinal orthodoxy also went againstnthe nature of the American politicalnexperiment. The confessional strifenthat had proved so ruinous in Europenwas still vivid in the Founders’ minds.nYet the pluralism we inherited has,nby now, been strained to the breakingnpoint. The principle of religious diver­nChatting About EvilnIngeborg Day: Ghost Waltz; VikingnPress; New York.nby Christina MurphynJbarly into Ghost Waltz, IngeborgnDay comments that between 1945 andn1975 alone nearly fifty thousand booksnwere written about Adolf Hitler, andnshe wonders whether her own book willncontribute much toward unraveling thencomplex tapestry of evil and conflictingnvalues that was nazi Germany. In anway, she is right to wonder, for GhostnWaltz is a probing of one central issue:nhow the parents Day remembers as lovingnand kind could have endorsed Hitler’snvision, how her father, especially,ncould have served as a member of thennazi secret police. Ghost Waltz’s successnthus depends upon two main premises—Day’snability to probe her father’snpsyche and her ability to relate hernfather’s individual actions to the largernpattern of an understanding of humannnature, or at least of human values.nSuccess eludes Day in her first en-nDr. Murphy teaches English at MississippinIndustrial College.nnnsity based on common biblical and classicalnvalues has given way to “alternatenlifestyles,” while ambition has beennemptied, both in fact and in the popularnimagination, of moral substance. Perhapsnthe time is then ripe—and certainlynmany Americans believe that it is—forna return to “first principles.” If, asnAristotle taught, each activity, study,nlife and community is directed toward anspecific inherent good, our ambitionsnas individuals and as a people can benrendered defensible only in the form ofna shared vision of justice. Without thisncommon perspective, we can surely expectna quantum leap in those unhappynfamily histories that Epstein so eloquentlynrecounts. Dndeavor. She readily admits that her fathernhas remained to her an enigma allnher life, a man whose life was closed upnand bound by duty and honor, whosenrigid and inflexible character made itnimpossible for his children to feel closento him, a man whom she describes asnpossessed by “an inability to see anynmatter from another person’s point ofnview, not a refusal, an inability.” Rigiditynshe perceives as the essence of hisncharacter:nEither/or, yes/no, black/white . . .nThis slavery held my father captivenall his life . . . For a lifetime my fathernlived as if driven by a machinenwith only an on/off switch governingnemotion and brain, a switch, moreover,nthat worked only once for anynhuman being or idea.nPerhaps this “on/off switch governingnemotion and brain” is a form ofnblindness, for surely if one is obliviousnor dispassionate to the shades of graynin human existence absolute actionsnbecome easier to perform and certainlyneasier to justify. Day perceives that hernmother operated in the same manner,nblinding herself to what she chose notn