THE TRIUMPH OF MEANNESS: America’s War Against Its Better Self.<i> By Nicolaus Mills</i> . <i> Houghton Mifflin: 260 pp., $25</i>

What do “Pulp Fiction,” Pat Buchanan, the Oklahoma City bombing, Louis Farrakhan, William Bennett and rap music have in common? According to Nicolaus Mills, professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College, they reflect the triumph in the 1990s of a debilitating culture of meanness in American life. Meanness has deep roots in our culture, Mills says, but “what characterizes the new meanness is that its spite and cruelty have become pervasive.”

“The Triumph of Meanness” is a lament by a liberal who sees the ideals of equality, compassion and fairness that so many fought for in the 1960s increasingly betrayed today. The new meanness, Mills argues, represents not only a shift to the right in politics or a widening public indifference to the plight of the poor and the vulnerable but also a newfound capacity for all-out enjoyment of cruelty and violence. This appetite is both mirrored and exemplified in what he calls the “savage pleasures” now offered in sports and entertainment--dog-fighting matches, ultimate fighting, Mortal Kombat video games, confrontational talk shows, “gotcha” journalism and rap songs like Ice-T’s “Cop Killer.”

Throughout our society, compassion has been “left behind as a relic of the past,” Mills writes. Instead, he says, he encounters greed-driven, spiteful cruelty wherever he looks. Such malevolence expresses itself in exploitative immigration policies, punitive welfare legislation, escalating viciousness in gender and racial wars and demeaning downsizing in the labor market. In these and many other ways, Mills explains, our society is betraying the test of progress former President Franklin D. Roosevelt set in his second inaugural address: “ . . . not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much [but] whether we provide enough for those who have little.”

For an illustration of “America in microcosm,” Mills invites us to consider how Orange County, California, dealt with its 1994 bankruptcy. After voters overwhelmingly rejected Measure R, a plan to protect county services by imposing a half-cent sales tax, in a June 1995 special election, the county faced brutal cuts in education, public safety and services to the poor and homeless. What reasons did county officials offer for cutting these items and not others? And exactly how did these officials exhibit the active spite and cruelty that Mills sees as reflecting America’s new meanness? Readers who ask these questions will be disappointed. Mills deals with the Orange County crisis in only the briefest of summaries. His treatment of the catastrophe oversimplifies the roles played by county officials and residents in finding a solution and the subsequent effect of their decisions on the community’s needy.

Mills’ study abounds in such quick characterizations, offered without examining what different parties involved in any particular controversy might have to say. For example, Mills alludes to the 1994 Republican “Contract with America” and the Million Man March of 1995 as exhibiting the new meanness, but he doesn’t stop to consider alternative interpretations. Such rapid-fire dismissal does a disservice not only to those whose arguments are left in the dark but also to readers, who are given too few facts with which to make up their own minds.

Ignoring counter arguments is especially questionable in a book that deplores the lack of “civic empathy” and compassion in today’s cultural climate. Surely the views of opponents deserve respectful consideration, as do their motives, before being denigrated as greedy, spiteful or cruel. In the absence of evenhanded analysis, the relentless imputing of meanness may strike the reader as, well, mean.

Mills is right, however, in pointing to the present stark inequalities between rich and poor in America that can be seen at close hand in situations like the cutting of welfare in Orange County. But his case would have been strengthened, not diluted, by a closer examination of the different factors that precipitated the Orange County financial crisis and of the roles of public officials, the press, voters and others in stifling a more civic-minded and compassionate response.

Although America’s levels of inequality are the highest among industrial democracies, inequality is rising even in nations, such as Sweden, that have long egalitarian traditions. Many of the economic, environmental, health-related and cultural pressures on income, health, educational and other forms of equality are international in nature and have little to do with meanness. Since the 1960s, the income gap between the world’s richest 20% and poorest 20% has doubled, even as both domestic and global levels of average longevity, nutrition, health and literacy continue to rise.

In its take-no-prisoners approach, “The Triumph of Meanness” has much in common with books at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, such as Robert Bork’s “Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.” Bork, as with Mills, deplores what has become of our society and even cites some of the same evils--including Ice-T’s “Cop Killer”--of a decadent and self-destructive culture. But the villains, for Bork, are liberals like Mills, whom he accuses of undermining the nation’s moral integrity. And the time when the worst damage was done was in the ‘60s, when radicals brought to bear what Bork calls their nihilistic and destructive egalitarian ideals.

Mills views the ‘60s in a different light. For him, it was a period when the counterculture played a more benign role than it does today, a time when Vietnam War protesters rallied to the cry of “Make love, not war,” while others served the cause of social protest or dropped out of the mainstream lifestyle. Today, Mills sees new groups comprising the counterculture, among them: militia groups, conspiracy theorists and advocates of racial and sexual revenge, animated by an entirely different tolerance for viciousness. “From the relatives of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims proposing to raise money for themselves by auctioning off the tools he used for torture and cannibalism, to the supporters of Lorena Bobbitt triumphantly making snipping movements with their fingers after her acquittal for cutting off her husband’s penis, the counterculture has proven as harsh and cruel as mainstream culture,” Mills argues.

“In the face of a culture and counterculture that offer such grim alternatives,” the author concludes, “what remains is the feeling that anything goes.” But why should these be the only alternatives? Such a constricted view of the forces in our society overlooks the many individuals and groups who, while not necessarily members of any counterculture, contribute time and resources to community development, race and gender equity and to furthering many of the causes that Mills rightly insists must not be abandoned. Any view limited to what is mean in mainstream culture and counterculture ignores all those who devote themselves with compassion and often ingenuity to bring about social change and relieve suffering.

Mills states that it has become the norm for fewer people to volunteer for organizations such as the Red Cross. All available evidence, however, suggests the opposite. The number of organizations serving humanitarian causes and promoting community development has escalated in recent decades, and these organizations employ hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad. In the 1990s, students in American high schools and colleges are undertaking community service in proportions far exceeding what took place in the ‘60s. In 1993, nearly half of all adult Americans engaged in some form of volunteer activity averaging about four hours a week. However Mills might evaluate them, it is hard to characterize these activities as expressing greed, spite or cruelty.

Perhaps the most striking part of “The Triumph of Meanness” is its epilogue. Mills makes ingenious use of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, “Looking Backward,” in which a “wealthy Boston Brahmin,” Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 only to awaken in 2000. West is surprised to discover an egalitarian society without the social strife and the gulf between rich and poor that he had known. Our own view of the coming millennium, Mills suggests, is entirely different from Bellamy’s: “As we head into the twenty-first century, we imagine the meanness and cruelty of the present, magnified beyond anything we have known, coming with us.”

Mills claims that three futuristic films “bring home this point with a vengeance:” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days,” Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys” and Kevin Reynolds’ “Waterworld.” “In each film, the message was unmistakable: dystopia, not utopia, is what we can look forward to,” he writes. But films, no matter how great their artistic merit, cannot be counted on to foretell the future any more than novels such as Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” Choosing a set of futuristic films or novels to predict what awaits humanity may be more useful as a Rorschach test than as a crystal ball. If 10 people were invited to select three films about our society’s most likely future, chances are they would pick 10 different sets, ranged along the spectrum from the most sanguine to the most dyspeptic.

Among the predictions least likely to hold up are those that ignore the possibility of breakthroughs such as those that brought about the end of the Cold War. As late as 10 years ago, few could foresee the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia or the lifting of the nuclear balance of terror. It is easy to forget how these extraordinary changes affected human lives, including the generations of young people in America who grew up under the threat of nuclear annihilation.

With respect to the Cold War, Mills presents only a somber conjecture. From Pat Buchanan, Irving Kristol and other conservatives, he has adopted the view that with the end of that war has come a need for new enemies--an “inner Cold War”--that he sees as being waged on the homeless, people on welfare and minorities. But although Mills agrees with Buchanan that there is a war and that it concerns America’s soul, he regards it as a war that will destroy us if it is not reversed. As with many other claims in “The Triumph of Meanness,” Mills offers little in the way of substantiation for this conjecture. Although his approach points to disturbing patterns of genuine spite and cruelty and reminds us about the risks of neglecting the goals of fairness and compassion that Roosevelt urged for our society, it is too one-sided to succeed in demonstrating that spite and cruelty have become so pervasive as to render those goals relics of the past.