Homeless on "Paradise Drive"

Peter Lawler has an interesting review of David Brooks's recent book, Paradise Drive, in the current issue of The Intercollegiate Review.  The review is called "Two Views of Americanization", and the two views in question are those of Chesterton and Heidegger.  Here's a bit from the introduction:

The question of “the American identity” is intertwined with another question about
what it means to say the world is becoming “Americanized.” Our country’s two
best twentieth-century critics—Martin Heidegger and G. K. Chesterton—differ
profoundly on the meaning and significance of this Americanization. For the German
Heidegger, the American middle class lives in the thrall of a technological
utopianism that is making human beings everywhere ever more displaced or homeless.
Our poetic pragmatists, such as David Brooks in his recent Paradise Drive, seem to
differ from Heidegger mainly by putting an optimistic American spin on the technological
fate that Heidegger abhors.

For the English Catholic Chesterton, however, to Americanize the world would
be to make every displaced person throughout the world at home in the American
way—which is to say, at home with the truth about being human. For Chesterton,
to be a middle-class American is to live in light of the truth about our spiritual existence
between the other animals and God.

Heidegger and Chesterton are both partly right, as we can see from the evidence that
the judicious and conflicted Brooks has presents in his books and New York Times
columns.

Rick