Dear DAA65:
If you've been following the discussion on this blog, the essay below will not contain very much new information; and I agree that we've probably worked over Steve Jobs ad nauseam, and should probably let the poor bugger rest in peace. However, I wanted to collect my thoughts in a more coherent form, so as to present what I feel is a generally ignored slant on the Wall St. protests. Or at least, I can't find any mention of this thesis anywhere, which is hardly surprising. The idea of a Stage 1 and Stage 2 of protest movements, and the possibility that the "screen culture" and the social media promote the first and then undercut the second, is to me an intriguing possibility, and I'm thinking it may even be correct. But that it would not be raised in the media (whether virtual or hard copy) should hardly come as a shock, given the enormous "religious" pull of technology as a supposed panacea in American history--as dear to the Left as it is to the Right. Anyway, I offer this reorganization of my previous scribblings as food for thought. As follows:
Like most folks reading this, I want the Wall St. protests to succeed, though at this point I'm not exactly clear as to what that would look like. Minimally, the arrest and trials (preferably at the World Court in The Hague) of numerous CEOs for financial terrorism; confiscation of the wealth of the top 1% and the redistribution of it among the rest of us; immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan; reduction of the Pentagon budget by 90%; massive reparations, plus heartfelt apologies, to Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, and several other countries, for the horror we visited upon them through the CIA and our foreign policy; and so on. In terms of what needs to be done in order to turn America around, these are admittedly very small steps—baby steps, really—but one has to begin somewhere, after all. However, this is to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, as far as Occupy Wall Street goes, anything might happen. Historically speaking, demonstrations that seemed tame suddenly caught fire, as in the case of, say, the Russian Revolution. So it’s hard to predict the outcome of these protests in any definitive way.
That being said, I confess it doesn't seem likely that these protests can reverse 400 years of a culture based on “hustling,” as I call it in my most recent book, Why America Failed, or the post-Civil War consolidation of corporate America. Which brings to mind a quote from Lincoln: we must "disenthrall" ourselves, he said. Are we now clutching at straws, and getting all enthralled? Look at the enthrallment over Obama in 2008, and how he turned out to be the very opposite of what he said he was. (Basically, a George Bush who can speak English.) I hear Michael Moore saying how these protests will sweep the country, and I think: but you thought Obama was going to sweep the country. Maybe it's time to look at our tendency toward enthrallment, and figure out why “sweeping” is not very likely.
A friend of mine, a journalist, was down at the Washington, DC, protests a few days ago and gave a talk about formulating a new foreign policy for the United States. Only 50 people attended, he told me, and of those only two were under 60 years of age. This for me is an ominous sign. Where can these protests wind up, if they are only about euphoria and youthful energy, and if a sober analysis of American history and our situation today is not a factor in the current uprising?
So much is made of the role of the “social media” in these types of uprisings; I remain skeptical on a number of grounds. I mean, Facebook didn’t play much of a role that I know of in Paris during 1789; and where is the Egyptian “revolution” now? But it goes much deeper than this. Even if we credit the social media with being able to mobilize youthful energy, this is only Stage 1 of any successful protest. Stage 2 is really being able to know and analyze what this country is about, or what a new US foreign policy might consist of; and on this score, the very things that made Stage 1 possible now ironically serve to make Stage 2 extremely difficult, if not impossible. For it is because of these media, and the cumulative impact of television and the Internet in our lives, that young Americans are literally unable to think. They don't know what the difference is between information and knowledge, nor do they really understand what an argument is; and thanks to the new telecommunications technologies, they now have the attention span of a gnat. Printed books take time; they are designed for thinking and reflection, whereas screens are designed for scanning, for bouncing around, for “Whassup, dude?” And if these folks should happen to attend a lecture, they typically sit there and check their e-mail or text-message their friends. In such a context, Stage 2 of the protest is not likely to come about.
All this current worship of Steve Jobs is a symptom of massive cultural dysfunction and decay, in my view; but not just mine. There is by now a large literature on the damage caused by the Net, Google, Facebook, and so on, even detailing the negative impact they have on synaptic connections in the human brain (cf. Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, Christine Rosen, et al.). Nevertheless, I think we are still a long way from really grasping the incredible damage wrought on ourselves, and our culture, by the googlification of American society; from understanding that Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg have been little more than cultural undertakers.
This is something I deal with in Chapter 3 of Why America Failed, devoted to the history of American technology. One can of course argue that there are good and bad technologies, or good and bad uses of technology; this is the conventional wisdom on the subject. But the truth is that technology is never neutral, never value-free: as Marshall McLuhan (among others) argued decades ago, any particular technology carries a value system with it, and introduced into a culture it will change the nature of that culture quite profoundly. In short order, thanks to Jobs & Co., we've gone from a literate culture that had a human depth, and a sense of self, to a screen culture that has neither. All that remains is the flickering image of the moment—not exactly the stuff of revolution, or even serious protest. Really, what could be more congenial to the American corporate state? If I could get myself appointed Dictator of America (benevolent, of course), my first order of business would be to require that (a) everyone own a cell phone, and be using it almost constantly; (b) everyone be signed up on Facebook and Twitter; and (c) everyone be taking Prozac or Zoloft on a daily basis. I would reign in perpetuity, no doubt about it.
©Morris Berman, 2011
October 12, 2011
October 06, 2011
Dumping the American Dream
Many years ago, as an undergraduate at Cornell, I heard about a radical economics professor, Douglas Dowd, who stood out from the pack and gave riveting courses. As a mathematics major, I didn't have much time for social science classes, so I had to miss Prof. Dowd's teaching. I really regret it now, but lately I've been trying to make up for lost time by dipping into his work. The Twisted Dream, published in 1974, is a history of US capitalism since 1776, and makes for fascinating reading.
At one point Dowd quotes from Thorstein Veblen's The Instinct of Workmanship (1914), that "history records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation." Dowd goes on to talk about the destruction of the environment and of our cities, stating that "growth for its own sake, production for its own sake, consumption for its own sake, and power for the sake of continuing the rest--these are the drives that have shaped the modern world, whose leader is presently the United States." He continues:
"We can seek to live at peace with our environment, our fellow human beings, and ourselves in an urban and industrial civilization. We can, but not so long as the bulk of Americans continue to strive for profit and power and an overflowing cornucopia of increasingly contrived and expensive consumer goods--strive as donkeys strive for carrots fixed beyond their noses. The bulk of Americans cannot achieve what they seek.
"The time has come to take thought, to reflect on what the genuine needs and pleasures of life are, and to find some symmetry between our ends and our means. Those ends are not mysterious, or the province of a few: we wish ourselves and our loved ones to eat well, to be comfortably clothed and housed, to learn through education what we can become and do, to be healthy, to enjoy nature and the works of the species; to have control over our lives. Each of these ends moves away from us, not closer, with each passing year. We count as our treasures what we have been socialized to count as treasures, though they defile our lives and make robots of us all: the automobile, the TV, the encapsulated suburban existence, the gleaming high buildings, the ever-rising GNP, 'fast' food. [To which we might add: the terrible legacy of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg--"heroes" only in an upside-down world.] We are moving in the wrong direction for human beings."
Nothing like telling it like it is, and I hope that the protesters on Wall St. and elsewhere understand that the proper goal for their movement is not extending the American Dream, but putting it to rest. As for Prof. Dowd: he is 92 years old and lives in Italy. Until very recently he was teaching classes on a p/t basis at the University of Modena. A truly great American figure, who understands what it means to live a genuine life.
(c)Morris Berman, 2011
At one point Dowd quotes from Thorstein Veblen's The Instinct of Workmanship (1914), that "history records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation." Dowd goes on to talk about the destruction of the environment and of our cities, stating that "growth for its own sake, production for its own sake, consumption for its own sake, and power for the sake of continuing the rest--these are the drives that have shaped the modern world, whose leader is presently the United States." He continues:
"We can seek to live at peace with our environment, our fellow human beings, and ourselves in an urban and industrial civilization. We can, but not so long as the bulk of Americans continue to strive for profit and power and an overflowing cornucopia of increasingly contrived and expensive consumer goods--strive as donkeys strive for carrots fixed beyond their noses. The bulk of Americans cannot achieve what they seek.
"The time has come to take thought, to reflect on what the genuine needs and pleasures of life are, and to find some symmetry between our ends and our means. Those ends are not mysterious, or the province of a few: we wish ourselves and our loved ones to eat well, to be comfortably clothed and housed, to learn through education what we can become and do, to be healthy, to enjoy nature and the works of the species; to have control over our lives. Each of these ends moves away from us, not closer, with each passing year. We count as our treasures what we have been socialized to count as treasures, though they defile our lives and make robots of us all: the automobile, the TV, the encapsulated suburban existence, the gleaming high buildings, the ever-rising GNP, 'fast' food. [To which we might add: the terrible legacy of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg--"heroes" only in an upside-down world.] We are moving in the wrong direction for human beings."
Nothing like telling it like it is, and I hope that the protesters on Wall St. and elsewhere understand that the proper goal for their movement is not extending the American Dream, but putting it to rest. As for Prof. Dowd: he is 92 years old and lives in Italy. Until very recently he was teaching classes on a p/t basis at the University of Modena. A truly great American figure, who understands what it means to live a genuine life.
(c)Morris Berman, 2011
October 02, 2011
Letter to the New Yorker
Dear DAA-ers,
Below is the full text of a letter I'm about to submit to the New Yorker. Given the size allotted to the letters they print, I'm going to have to reduce it by about 50%; but no reason not to post the pre-cut version here, for you to read. As follows:
As a long-time subscriber to the magazine, I found the issue of September 12, 2011 one of the funnier ones I’ve had the pleasure of reading. First we have an essay by Adam Gopnik, arguing that “declinist” theories of history are misguided and/or illusory (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat”); then one by George Packer documenting the very real decline of the United States (“Coming Apart”). Packer even writes that after 9/11, “the deeper problem lay in an ongoing decline that was greater than any single event or policy.” But besides taking pot-shots at easy targets such as Oswald Spengler, Niall Ferguson, and Thomas Friedman/Michael Mandelbaum, Gopnik’s argument strikes me as being rather glib and superficial, and mistaken on a number of key points. I’ll cite only three:
1. The notion that for “declinist” historians, the catastrophe never quite arrives. Gopnik makes no mention of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, or Jared Diamond’s Collapse, but it is common knowledge that history is a graveyard of empires and civilizations, and decline and fall is the one thing we can be absolutely sure of. “American exceptionalism” won’t save us now; in fact, it is a major factor in our decline.
2. This mistaken premise leads Gopnik to assert that the most recent declinist book (whatever it is) has to explain why the previous ones were wrong. But in fact, it’s not like predicting that the world will end on such-and-such a date; rather, being large-scale processes, declines take their time. They do not occur on, say, August 4, A.D. 476, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. In addition, declinist works that discuss or focus on contemporary America include, inter alia, Andrew Hacker, The End of the American Era (1970); George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics (1987); and my own trilogy (The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America, and Why America Failed), for which I certainly did not feel any need to “explain why the previous declinist books were wrong.” They weren’t wrong at all; rather, they can be seen to form one more-or-less continuous argument that the American empire is coming to a close.
3. Gopnik asserts that ever since Spengler, historians have found it necessary to show that the errors contributing to the decline were “part of some big, hitherto invisible pattern of decline.” The “saner” idea, he argues, is that “things were good and now they’re bad, and that they could get either better or worse, depending on what happens next.” Whose definition of sanity? The fact is that the writing of history does consist in finding or mapping patterns; and instead of citing Karl Popper’s “proof” against historicism, Gopnik would have done better to have referred to E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, which made short (and embarrassing) work of Popper’s so-called proof. Indeed, the belief that “history is just one damn thing after another” (Toynbee’s contemptuous characterization of his critics) is about as outworn as the Great Man theory of history.
There is, of course, the question of why Gopnik wants to refute declinism, which I suspect has a lot to do with not wanting to face the very real decline George Packer talks about. Garrison Keillor once wrote that “We have this ability in Lake Wobegon to look reality right in the eye and deny it.” Gopnik’s essay is a good example of this, it seems to me. The author may not be a declinist, but he is, quite clearly, a denialist.
Below is the full text of a letter I'm about to submit to the New Yorker. Given the size allotted to the letters they print, I'm going to have to reduce it by about 50%; but no reason not to post the pre-cut version here, for you to read. As follows:
As a long-time subscriber to the magazine, I found the issue of September 12, 2011 one of the funnier ones I’ve had the pleasure of reading. First we have an essay by Adam Gopnik, arguing that “declinist” theories of history are misguided and/or illusory (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat”); then one by George Packer documenting the very real decline of the United States (“Coming Apart”). Packer even writes that after 9/11, “the deeper problem lay in an ongoing decline that was greater than any single event or policy.” But besides taking pot-shots at easy targets such as Oswald Spengler, Niall Ferguson, and Thomas Friedman/Michael Mandelbaum, Gopnik’s argument strikes me as being rather glib and superficial, and mistaken on a number of key points. I’ll cite only three:
1. The notion that for “declinist” historians, the catastrophe never quite arrives. Gopnik makes no mention of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, or Jared Diamond’s Collapse, but it is common knowledge that history is a graveyard of empires and civilizations, and decline and fall is the one thing we can be absolutely sure of. “American exceptionalism” won’t save us now; in fact, it is a major factor in our decline.
2. This mistaken premise leads Gopnik to assert that the most recent declinist book (whatever it is) has to explain why the previous ones were wrong. But in fact, it’s not like predicting that the world will end on such-and-such a date; rather, being large-scale processes, declines take their time. They do not occur on, say, August 4, A.D. 476, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. In addition, declinist works that discuss or focus on contemporary America include, inter alia, Andrew Hacker, The End of the American Era (1970); George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics (1987); and my own trilogy (The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America, and Why America Failed), for which I certainly did not feel any need to “explain why the previous declinist books were wrong.” They weren’t wrong at all; rather, they can be seen to form one more-or-less continuous argument that the American empire is coming to a close.
3. Gopnik asserts that ever since Spengler, historians have found it necessary to show that the errors contributing to the decline were “part of some big, hitherto invisible pattern of decline.” The “saner” idea, he argues, is that “things were good and now they’re bad, and that they could get either better or worse, depending on what happens next.” Whose definition of sanity? The fact is that the writing of history does consist in finding or mapping patterns; and instead of citing Karl Popper’s “proof” against historicism, Gopnik would have done better to have referred to E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, which made short (and embarrassing) work of Popper’s so-called proof. Indeed, the belief that “history is just one damn thing after another” (Toynbee’s contemptuous characterization of his critics) is about as outworn as the Great Man theory of history.
There is, of course, the question of why Gopnik wants to refute declinism, which I suspect has a lot to do with not wanting to face the very real decline George Packer talks about. Garrison Keillor once wrote that “We have this ability in Lake Wobegon to look reality right in the eye and deny it.” Gopnik’s essay is a good example of this, it seems to me. The author may not be a declinist, but he is, quite clearly, a denialist.
September 30, 2011
The Wall Street Protests
It began on September 17, and has now run for thirteen days. There are, perhaps, only a couple of hundred of them, but young people especially have shown up to protest the greed and corruption endemic to the American economy, epitomized by Wall Street financiers. The regular news media gave them almost no coverage; the NYPD overreacted with predictable violence. Many got arrested and hauled away, but the protest continues. Unions have pledged their support, and the movement is now spreading to other cities across the nation. Finally, it would seem, someone is standing up and saying No. Even more, “Go fuck yourself.”
I agree with Chris Hedges when he says that these folks are the best of society; I also think the crowd at Goldman Sachs and their ilk are the worst: bloodsuckers and leeches, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I hope the protest grows from 200 to 2 million, and affects every city in the land. I hope it succeeds…but this is where I start to have certain problems. What is, in fact, the goal? What would success look like in this case? It’s not altogether clear; and beyond a desire to have an economy not run by vampires, by a gangster elite, the protesters’ message is rather muddy.
On one level, it would be great if the protesters could put it on their signs, and say it directly to the American public: socialism; we want a socialist economy. It’s not exactly the way to win friends and influence people in the U.S., and I’m not sure that is what they really want anyway. But there’s at least this, that they want a fairer society, one that does not have a huge gulf between the top 1% and the rest of us. Some form of redistribution of wealth, that presumably would resurrect aspects of the New Deal that the GOP has striven to destroy since Ronald Reagan (and actually, before). After all, we have millions now thrown out of their homes, millions with no prospect of a job, millions living in tent cities and on bread lines, millions without any health insurance, and so on. Re-instigating things such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1934, real union strength, collective bargaining, workers’ benefits—all of this would be to the good, and I’m assuming that this is on the protesters’ agenda.
The problem is that we did have all this once, and to be sure, it was a much fairer and healthier society; but it was still capitalism. This, as most historians will tell you, was FDR’s historic role: he wanted to save capitalism, and he did. In the end, the mental framework, that of a society and way of life based on greed, was still the same. It was just that with the New Deal there were some constraints in place, and it is those that were unraveled in the ensuing decades. But as I argue in Why America Failed, greed has been the touchstone of the American experiment since 1584, since the earliest colonization of the continent (for its resources); it didn’t suddenly emerge 400 years later with Ronald Reagan and Gordon Gekko. Asked, on one occasion, what it was that the working man wanted, labor leader Samuel Gompers was quite explicit: “More.” Socialism doesn’t envision a different type of system; it envisions the same system with the goodies spread around more evenly.
That some labor unions have indicated their support for the protesters is therefore not surprising. Nor am I condemning them: in the face of Reaganism and Gekkoism run riot, fighting against a 1%-99% split in the wealth is obviously necessary. But when the dust settles, it will still be the United States, with the 400-year-old ideology of the United States; even if we could get the New Deal back, the slogan would still be More. Even so-called progressives think the American Dream is where it’s at. They see no problem with “growth” at all. They just want to extend its benefits to everyone. But suppose—radical thought—that the American Dream was the problem, not the solution? Unfortunately, the ideology of the Dream, of an endless frontier, casts a long shadow over all of us, so that grasping this possibility is quite difficult even for the most intelligent Americans.
Case in point: an article in the 10 October 2011 edition of The Nation by Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel entitled “Can a Movement Save the American Dream?” The authors rightly describe how the very rich have screwed the rest of us out of the A.D., and argue that we need to restore it—redistribute wealth and benefits so that every American can live it. But again, there is no recognition that this Dream is conceptually grounded in the notion of a world without limits; that it is the core of what America is and has always been about; and that it is (as a result) the rock upon which we are now foundering. In spite of the identification (or excoriation) of this ideological pathology by a rather long list of eminent historians, including David Potter, Louis Hartz, C. Vann Woodward, Richard Hofstadter, William Appleman Williams, and Jackson Lears, “progressives” just don’t get it, any more than neoliberals do. Writing in the New Republic nearly twenty years ago, Lears stated that “myths of progress continue to mesmerize intellectuals at all points on the political spectrum, from The Nation to the National Review.” Thus Williams repeatedly pointed out that the Dream was based on a program of endless economic expansion, which eventually made imperialism, and thus the suffering of millions, inevitable. Cornell University economist Douglas Dowd made his own opinion of our way of life explicit in a book he published in 1974: The Twisted Dream. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued many years ago, there is a great difference between the “ethics of maxima” and the “ethics of optima,” and the U.S. is definitely addicted to the former: “growth”. A more accurate word for it might be “cancer.” In recent times, only Jimmy Carter had the courage to tell the American people that this was the vision of those who were spiritually empty, and his audience wasted no time in voting him out of office in favor of a man who told them they could and should have it all; that the A.D. was Life Itself.
So I don’t really know what the protesters’ goals are, and I’m not sure they do either, beyond shipping Lloyd Blankfein out to Antarctica, to live among the penguins. The problem is that historically speaking, protest against the system is not really against the system as such. We like to talk in terms of a multicultural society, but women, blacks, Hispanics, union leaders, you name it: they all really share the same vision. The goal is to get my group a bigger cut of the pie; it’s not to suggest that the pie is rotten. The environmental movement excepted, there is very little thinking in America about getting beyond “growth” and “progress,” beyond a purely materialist-consumerist society, and this certainly applies to the poor as well. As John Steinbeck famously remarked, in the U.S. the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
One protest leader who did understand the spiritual dimension lacking in all this was Martin Luther King. The story might be apocryphal, but one black colleague of mine told me that just before he died, King said to Harry Belafonte that he sometimes had the uneasy feeling that his activism was only serving to “herd people into a burning church.” Sure, he was saying: we might be able to get black people a larger share of the pie, of the American Dream; but the pie is an inferno, a hellish way of life.
Are the protesters saying that?
(c)Morris Berman, 2011
I agree with Chris Hedges when he says that these folks are the best of society; I also think the crowd at Goldman Sachs and their ilk are the worst: bloodsuckers and leeches, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I hope the protest grows from 200 to 2 million, and affects every city in the land. I hope it succeeds…but this is where I start to have certain problems. What is, in fact, the goal? What would success look like in this case? It’s not altogether clear; and beyond a desire to have an economy not run by vampires, by a gangster elite, the protesters’ message is rather muddy.
On one level, it would be great if the protesters could put it on their signs, and say it directly to the American public: socialism; we want a socialist economy. It’s not exactly the way to win friends and influence people in the U.S., and I’m not sure that is what they really want anyway. But there’s at least this, that they want a fairer society, one that does not have a huge gulf between the top 1% and the rest of us. Some form of redistribution of wealth, that presumably would resurrect aspects of the New Deal that the GOP has striven to destroy since Ronald Reagan (and actually, before). After all, we have millions now thrown out of their homes, millions with no prospect of a job, millions living in tent cities and on bread lines, millions without any health insurance, and so on. Re-instigating things such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1934, real union strength, collective bargaining, workers’ benefits—all of this would be to the good, and I’m assuming that this is on the protesters’ agenda.
The problem is that we did have all this once, and to be sure, it was a much fairer and healthier society; but it was still capitalism. This, as most historians will tell you, was FDR’s historic role: he wanted to save capitalism, and he did. In the end, the mental framework, that of a society and way of life based on greed, was still the same. It was just that with the New Deal there were some constraints in place, and it is those that were unraveled in the ensuing decades. But as I argue in Why America Failed, greed has been the touchstone of the American experiment since 1584, since the earliest colonization of the continent (for its resources); it didn’t suddenly emerge 400 years later with Ronald Reagan and Gordon Gekko. Asked, on one occasion, what it was that the working man wanted, labor leader Samuel Gompers was quite explicit: “More.” Socialism doesn’t envision a different type of system; it envisions the same system with the goodies spread around more evenly.
That some labor unions have indicated their support for the protesters is therefore not surprising. Nor am I condemning them: in the face of Reaganism and Gekkoism run riot, fighting against a 1%-99% split in the wealth is obviously necessary. But when the dust settles, it will still be the United States, with the 400-year-old ideology of the United States; even if we could get the New Deal back, the slogan would still be More. Even so-called progressives think the American Dream is where it’s at. They see no problem with “growth” at all. They just want to extend its benefits to everyone. But suppose—radical thought—that the American Dream was the problem, not the solution? Unfortunately, the ideology of the Dream, of an endless frontier, casts a long shadow over all of us, so that grasping this possibility is quite difficult even for the most intelligent Americans.
Case in point: an article in the 10 October 2011 edition of The Nation by Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel entitled “Can a Movement Save the American Dream?” The authors rightly describe how the very rich have screwed the rest of us out of the A.D., and argue that we need to restore it—redistribute wealth and benefits so that every American can live it. But again, there is no recognition that this Dream is conceptually grounded in the notion of a world without limits; that it is the core of what America is and has always been about; and that it is (as a result) the rock upon which we are now foundering. In spite of the identification (or excoriation) of this ideological pathology by a rather long list of eminent historians, including David Potter, Louis Hartz, C. Vann Woodward, Richard Hofstadter, William Appleman Williams, and Jackson Lears, “progressives” just don’t get it, any more than neoliberals do. Writing in the New Republic nearly twenty years ago, Lears stated that “myths of progress continue to mesmerize intellectuals at all points on the political spectrum, from The Nation to the National Review.” Thus Williams repeatedly pointed out that the Dream was based on a program of endless economic expansion, which eventually made imperialism, and thus the suffering of millions, inevitable. Cornell University economist Douglas Dowd made his own opinion of our way of life explicit in a book he published in 1974: The Twisted Dream. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued many years ago, there is a great difference between the “ethics of maxima” and the “ethics of optima,” and the U.S. is definitely addicted to the former: “growth”. A more accurate word for it might be “cancer.” In recent times, only Jimmy Carter had the courage to tell the American people that this was the vision of those who were spiritually empty, and his audience wasted no time in voting him out of office in favor of a man who told them they could and should have it all; that the A.D. was Life Itself.
So I don’t really know what the protesters’ goals are, and I’m not sure they do either, beyond shipping Lloyd Blankfein out to Antarctica, to live among the penguins. The problem is that historically speaking, protest against the system is not really against the system as such. We like to talk in terms of a multicultural society, but women, blacks, Hispanics, union leaders, you name it: they all really share the same vision. The goal is to get my group a bigger cut of the pie; it’s not to suggest that the pie is rotten. The environmental movement excepted, there is very little thinking in America about getting beyond “growth” and “progress,” beyond a purely materialist-consumerist society, and this certainly applies to the poor as well. As John Steinbeck famously remarked, in the U.S. the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
One protest leader who did understand the spiritual dimension lacking in all this was Martin Luther King. The story might be apocryphal, but one black colleague of mine told me that just before he died, King said to Harry Belafonte that he sometimes had the uneasy feeling that his activism was only serving to “herd people into a burning church.” Sure, he was saying: we might be able to get black people a larger share of the pie, of the American Dream; but the pie is an inferno, a hellish way of life.
Are the protesters saying that?
(c)Morris Berman, 2011
September 28, 2011
Jonathan Swift Revisited
Readers of this blog may remember a post I did a while ago entitled “Fork in the Road,” briefly referring to the deleterious effects of screens on the brain. The bulk of the article, however, dealt with the effects of anti-depressant drugs, as discussed by Marcia Angell in two essays in the New York Review of Books that pulled no punches on the subject. One thing that particularly impressed me was the impact of the “better living through chemistry” model of mental health on our children. During 1987-2007, the stats of mental disability among children multiplied by a factor of 35, such that mental illness is now the leading cause of disability among this segment of the population. Cruising the Net, one finds numerous studies regarding the effects of Prozac on infants derived from mothers taking the drug during pregnancy, or while breastfeeding: autism, heart defects, poor feeding, insomnia. Not the greatest way to come into the world, it would seem.
Even beyond this is the fact that a certain percentage of American preschoolers—and I was not able to determine what that figure currently is—are on anti-depressant drugs. I find the idea of a three-year-old on Zoloft absolutely chilling, in a Brave New World kind of way. This has got to be a terrible mistake; it’s got to be a way of destroying an infant’s self, so that dependency and psychological disorientation become the “normal” way of being in the world, for these poor kids. Research has suggested this in the case of adults: that the use of anti-psychotic drugs is associated with atrophy of the prefrontal cortex, and that after only a few weeks of drug use the brain begins to function in a different way. How much more powerful and long-lasting must these effects be in the case of toddlers?
The real motivation for getting very young children hooked on these meds is, of course, money: the use of such drugs from a very early age pretty much guarantees Big Pharma an endless supply of customers. It is not, à la Jonathan Swift (“A Modest Proposal”), that there is some kind of plot out there to destroy our children, wreck their intellectual and emotional functioning from age two or even earlier. But if that is the result, does it matter? If the percentage of the under-four age group on anti-depressants continues to grow, then it might be said that deliberately or not, we are eating our children alive. The jury is still out on all this, but the indications are certainly not encouraging.
When it comes to screens, however, so dramatically represented in American society by things such as Facebook and Twitter, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt: these are killers. As Sherry Turkle shows in her most recent book, Alone Together, the much-touted idea of “virtual community” proved to be a fraud. What we really have is increased alienation and depression. All of these social media and accompanying devices peddle a phony intimacy, because if you are at home alone with a screen, that’s where you actually are. Let’s take a look at some of the evidence.
In 1998 a research team at Carnegie Mellon University published an empirical study entitled “Internet Paradox,” demonstrating that within the first year or two online, people were experiencing less social engagement and poorer psychological well-being. The researchers also found that a greater use of the Internet was associated with less family communication, a reduction in local social circles, and an increase in loneliness, as well as higher rates of depression. The authors of the study concluded by suggesting that by using the Net, people were “substituting poorer quality social relationships for better relationships, that is, substituting weak ties for strong ones,” with consequent negative effects. One thinks of Mark Zuckerberg, poor rich asshole, destroying the one real friendship he had (with Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin), so that he could acquire a million meaningless ones.
A more recent study, conducted at the University of Michigan for the period 1979-2009, revealed a 48% decrease in empathy among college students during this time, and a 34% decrease in the ability to see things from another person’s perspective. Most of these declines, it turns out, occurred over the past decade, and the general interpretation is that this is related to the isolation involved in the use of personal technology and popular social networking sites that have become so much a part of student life. The study suggested that this was not surprising “in a world filled with rampant technology revolving around personal needs and self-expression.” But it is also the nature of the technology that is at issue, because the Internet and other electronic media are based on speed and distraction, on rapidly shifting attention. It turns out that the higher emotions, such as empathy and compassion, emerge from neural processes that are inherently slow. Various studies have shown that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience such emotions, or see things from the perspective of others. In a word, these technologies may be undermining our moral sense. At the very least, it becomes hard to argue that they are promoting community.
It also seems to be the case that the use of screens is creating a different type of human being, partly as a result of the neural rewiring of the brain that these devices engender. Much of the evidence for this argument has been collected and expanded upon by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Marshall McLuhan had argued that the brain takes on the characteristics of the technology it uses, and we now see this in the cultural shift from print media to screens. For the Internet’s emphasis (and of course, that of Facebook and Twitter) is on searching and skimming, not on genuine reading or contemplation. As a result, given what we now know about the relative plasticity of the brain, the ability to reflect or to grasp the nuance of a situation is pushed to the margins. The Net, he says, is literally rerouting the pathways in our brains, making our thought processes increasingly shallow. It breaks up the content of a text into searchable chunks, and surrounds it with other content. This is why a page online is very different from a page of print. The concentration and attention factor are high for the latter, low for the former. Then there are the various links, which encourage us not to devote our attention to any single thing but rather to jump from item to item. Our attachment to any single item is thus provisional and fragmented. The Net and its related technologies thus constitute an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.”
Print, on the other hand, has (or should I say had?) a quality of calm attentiveness. “The quiet was part of the meaning,” as the poet Wallace Stevens once put it. When a printed text is transferred to an electronic device, says Carr, it turns into something like a website; the calm attentiveness disappears. Instead, the Net & Co. deliver repetitive, intense, and addictive stimuli, promoting very superficial understanding. Basically, you don’t really read on a screen; it’s a different kind of activity: browsing, scanning, keyword spotting, and so on. And the better you get at this, the less able you are to think deeply or creatively. We are, Carr concludes (quoting the playwright Richard Foreman), turning into “pancake people”—spread wide and thin. Facebook and Twitter are turning out such folks by the IHOP-load.
The lack of interest in printed material, and the corresponding upswing in interest in screens is, of course, especially pronounced among the young. In 2009 the average American teenager was sending or receiving 2,272 text messages a month(!). Meanwhile, the amount of time the average American between twenty-five and thirty-four years of age devoted to reading print in 2008 was forty-nine minutes a week. As Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University cogently puts it, “the digital world may be the greatest threat yet to the endangered reading brain as it has developed over the past five thousand years.” Collectively, adds author Christine Rosen, this is the endpoint of the tragedy we are now witnessing:
“Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.”
There is little room in this world, Carr points out, for “the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation.” In such a world, he goes on to say, “Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.” The cultural impact follows upon the individual one, then: what we are witnessing is the replacement of a complex inner diversity with a new kind of self, one devoid of any sense of cultural inheritance. Screens are generating the emptiest people in the history of the world, and as in The Matrix, there is no way for these folks to get outside themselves and perceive this. This is the “frenzy” of technological society famously referred to by Martin Heidegger. In the pathological climate of “techno-social Darwinism,” as Rosen calls it, there is no time for stillness. All of these brave new people lack the ability to be alone with their thoughts, or to appreciate the importance of silence. I have found that even the brightest people don’t get it, have no idea what George Steiner meant when he called modernity “the systematic suppression of silence.” Silence, after all, is the source of all self-knowledge, and of much creativity as well. But it is hardly valued by societies that confuse creativity with productivity, and incessant noise with aliveness. As a result, we don’t notice that fundamental aspects of being human are disappearing. During his time at Yale, William Deresiewicz asked his students what place solitude had in their lives. In response, they seemed to be puzzled that anyone would want to be alone. “Young people today,” he concluded, “seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, [and] can’t imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology…seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude.” The world of creativity, of imagination, of depth of the self, is closing down.
The similarity of all this to toddlers on anti-depressants is thrown into stark relief when you realize that the corporate goal is to hook children as early as possible. Last month, Rullingnet Corp. (based in Canada) launched Vinci, a 7” touch-screen tablet for the under-four age group. It is the first tablet designed for babies as young as one week old—the product of a technological mindset that one can only call “creepy,” in my opinion, although the company’s tag line is, ironically enough, “Inspire the genius.” “We are just leveraging their curiosity,” says the inventor of the device. (Notice how a word from corporate finance gets imported into the world of child-rearing. It was leveraging that brought on the crash of 2008.) In fact, a recent study conducted by Parenting magazine and BlogHer found that 29% of Generation-X moms say their children were onto laptops by age two, and the figure rises to 34% for moms of Generation-Y. In the first month of its release, Rullingnet sold 600 Vincis.
In chapter 3 of Why America Failed I argue that technology has always functioned as America’s hidden religion, and that if you deprive Americans of their gadgets, they become depressed or enraged. What can one say when many users of Apple’s iPhone refer to it as “the Jesus phone”? This is not an accident. Technology in America has been associated with unlimited progress and therefore with utopia, with redemption, and when we are now giving touch-screens to one-week-old babies we are imprinting them in the same way that, say, a baptism might. But the reality of Facebook, Twitter, Vinci and the like is a story of false redemption. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes, what is omitted from public discussion today is the fact that almost every technological “advance” in recent years has deepened the “continuing decomposition and crumbling of social bonds and communal cohesion.” It goes way beyond the dumbing down of the culture, in other words (horrific as that is); it also involves increasing human disconnectedness, social atomization, rudeness, incivility. One effect of spending most of your time in a virtual world is that of “absent presence”: you treat the world as a mere backdrop, and devalue those around you. These are the hallmarks of a superficial, narcissistic society, one which possesses no inherent meaning, and whose Twittered citizens don’t as well. With techno-imprinting going on now at age one week, I think we can expect that things can only get worse. For there is no getting around it: eating our children alive means we are eating our society alive as well.
©Morris Berman, 2011
Even beyond this is the fact that a certain percentage of American preschoolers—and I was not able to determine what that figure currently is—are on anti-depressant drugs. I find the idea of a three-year-old on Zoloft absolutely chilling, in a Brave New World kind of way. This has got to be a terrible mistake; it’s got to be a way of destroying an infant’s self, so that dependency and psychological disorientation become the “normal” way of being in the world, for these poor kids. Research has suggested this in the case of adults: that the use of anti-psychotic drugs is associated with atrophy of the prefrontal cortex, and that after only a few weeks of drug use the brain begins to function in a different way. How much more powerful and long-lasting must these effects be in the case of toddlers?
The real motivation for getting very young children hooked on these meds is, of course, money: the use of such drugs from a very early age pretty much guarantees Big Pharma an endless supply of customers. It is not, à la Jonathan Swift (“A Modest Proposal”), that there is some kind of plot out there to destroy our children, wreck their intellectual and emotional functioning from age two or even earlier. But if that is the result, does it matter? If the percentage of the under-four age group on anti-depressants continues to grow, then it might be said that deliberately or not, we are eating our children alive. The jury is still out on all this, but the indications are certainly not encouraging.
When it comes to screens, however, so dramatically represented in American society by things such as Facebook and Twitter, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt: these are killers. As Sherry Turkle shows in her most recent book, Alone Together, the much-touted idea of “virtual community” proved to be a fraud. What we really have is increased alienation and depression. All of these social media and accompanying devices peddle a phony intimacy, because if you are at home alone with a screen, that’s where you actually are. Let’s take a look at some of the evidence.
In 1998 a research team at Carnegie Mellon University published an empirical study entitled “Internet Paradox,” demonstrating that within the first year or two online, people were experiencing less social engagement and poorer psychological well-being. The researchers also found that a greater use of the Internet was associated with less family communication, a reduction in local social circles, and an increase in loneliness, as well as higher rates of depression. The authors of the study concluded by suggesting that by using the Net, people were “substituting poorer quality social relationships for better relationships, that is, substituting weak ties for strong ones,” with consequent negative effects. One thinks of Mark Zuckerberg, poor rich asshole, destroying the one real friendship he had (with Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin), so that he could acquire a million meaningless ones.
A more recent study, conducted at the University of Michigan for the period 1979-2009, revealed a 48% decrease in empathy among college students during this time, and a 34% decrease in the ability to see things from another person’s perspective. Most of these declines, it turns out, occurred over the past decade, and the general interpretation is that this is related to the isolation involved in the use of personal technology and popular social networking sites that have become so much a part of student life. The study suggested that this was not surprising “in a world filled with rampant technology revolving around personal needs and self-expression.” But it is also the nature of the technology that is at issue, because the Internet and other electronic media are based on speed and distraction, on rapidly shifting attention. It turns out that the higher emotions, such as empathy and compassion, emerge from neural processes that are inherently slow. Various studies have shown that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience such emotions, or see things from the perspective of others. In a word, these technologies may be undermining our moral sense. At the very least, it becomes hard to argue that they are promoting community.
It also seems to be the case that the use of screens is creating a different type of human being, partly as a result of the neural rewiring of the brain that these devices engender. Much of the evidence for this argument has been collected and expanded upon by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Marshall McLuhan had argued that the brain takes on the characteristics of the technology it uses, and we now see this in the cultural shift from print media to screens. For the Internet’s emphasis (and of course, that of Facebook and Twitter) is on searching and skimming, not on genuine reading or contemplation. As a result, given what we now know about the relative plasticity of the brain, the ability to reflect or to grasp the nuance of a situation is pushed to the margins. The Net, he says, is literally rerouting the pathways in our brains, making our thought processes increasingly shallow. It breaks up the content of a text into searchable chunks, and surrounds it with other content. This is why a page online is very different from a page of print. The concentration and attention factor are high for the latter, low for the former. Then there are the various links, which encourage us not to devote our attention to any single thing but rather to jump from item to item. Our attachment to any single item is thus provisional and fragmented. The Net and its related technologies thus constitute an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.”
Print, on the other hand, has (or should I say had?) a quality of calm attentiveness. “The quiet was part of the meaning,” as the poet Wallace Stevens once put it. When a printed text is transferred to an electronic device, says Carr, it turns into something like a website; the calm attentiveness disappears. Instead, the Net & Co. deliver repetitive, intense, and addictive stimuli, promoting very superficial understanding. Basically, you don’t really read on a screen; it’s a different kind of activity: browsing, scanning, keyword spotting, and so on. And the better you get at this, the less able you are to think deeply or creatively. We are, Carr concludes (quoting the playwright Richard Foreman), turning into “pancake people”—spread wide and thin. Facebook and Twitter are turning out such folks by the IHOP-load.
The lack of interest in printed material, and the corresponding upswing in interest in screens is, of course, especially pronounced among the young. In 2009 the average American teenager was sending or receiving 2,272 text messages a month(!). Meanwhile, the amount of time the average American between twenty-five and thirty-four years of age devoted to reading print in 2008 was forty-nine minutes a week. As Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University cogently puts it, “the digital world may be the greatest threat yet to the endangered reading brain as it has developed over the past five thousand years.” Collectively, adds author Christine Rosen, this is the endpoint of the tragedy we are now witnessing:
“Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.”
There is little room in this world, Carr points out, for “the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation.” In such a world, he goes on to say, “Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.” The cultural impact follows upon the individual one, then: what we are witnessing is the replacement of a complex inner diversity with a new kind of self, one devoid of any sense of cultural inheritance. Screens are generating the emptiest people in the history of the world, and as in The Matrix, there is no way for these folks to get outside themselves and perceive this. This is the “frenzy” of technological society famously referred to by Martin Heidegger. In the pathological climate of “techno-social Darwinism,” as Rosen calls it, there is no time for stillness. All of these brave new people lack the ability to be alone with their thoughts, or to appreciate the importance of silence. I have found that even the brightest people don’t get it, have no idea what George Steiner meant when he called modernity “the systematic suppression of silence.” Silence, after all, is the source of all self-knowledge, and of much creativity as well. But it is hardly valued by societies that confuse creativity with productivity, and incessant noise with aliveness. As a result, we don’t notice that fundamental aspects of being human are disappearing. During his time at Yale, William Deresiewicz asked his students what place solitude had in their lives. In response, they seemed to be puzzled that anyone would want to be alone. “Young people today,” he concluded, “seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, [and] can’t imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology…seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude.” The world of creativity, of imagination, of depth of the self, is closing down.
The similarity of all this to toddlers on anti-depressants is thrown into stark relief when you realize that the corporate goal is to hook children as early as possible. Last month, Rullingnet Corp. (based in Canada) launched Vinci, a 7” touch-screen tablet for the under-four age group. It is the first tablet designed for babies as young as one week old—the product of a technological mindset that one can only call “creepy,” in my opinion, although the company’s tag line is, ironically enough, “Inspire the genius.” “We are just leveraging their curiosity,” says the inventor of the device. (Notice how a word from corporate finance gets imported into the world of child-rearing. It was leveraging that brought on the crash of 2008.) In fact, a recent study conducted by Parenting magazine and BlogHer found that 29% of Generation-X moms say their children were onto laptops by age two, and the figure rises to 34% for moms of Generation-Y. In the first month of its release, Rullingnet sold 600 Vincis.
In chapter 3 of Why America Failed I argue that technology has always functioned as America’s hidden religion, and that if you deprive Americans of their gadgets, they become depressed or enraged. What can one say when many users of Apple’s iPhone refer to it as “the Jesus phone”? This is not an accident. Technology in America has been associated with unlimited progress and therefore with utopia, with redemption, and when we are now giving touch-screens to one-week-old babies we are imprinting them in the same way that, say, a baptism might. But the reality of Facebook, Twitter, Vinci and the like is a story of false redemption. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes, what is omitted from public discussion today is the fact that almost every technological “advance” in recent years has deepened the “continuing decomposition and crumbling of social bonds and communal cohesion.” It goes way beyond the dumbing down of the culture, in other words (horrific as that is); it also involves increasing human disconnectedness, social atomization, rudeness, incivility. One effect of spending most of your time in a virtual world is that of “absent presence”: you treat the world as a mere backdrop, and devalue those around you. These are the hallmarks of a superficial, narcissistic society, one which possesses no inherent meaning, and whose Twittered citizens don’t as well. With techno-imprinting going on now at age one week, I think we can expect that things can only get worse. For there is no getting around it: eating our children alive means we are eating our society alive as well.
©Morris Berman, 2011
September 27, 2011
Zucker-Punched
(Partial disclaimer: in some cases my publicist didn’t say exactly what I have her saying, so I hope both she, and the reader, will allow me a bit of poetic license here. I do think I’ve preserved the spirit of our exchange, however. She’s just trying to drag me into the 22nd century, whereas I retain a certain fondness for the late 17th.)
OK, gather round, you DAA-ers; time to give you the low-down on publicity for WAF. It seems that Wiley, my publisher, finally came to the realization that in order to make money, you’ve got to spend it. Since Western Europe figured this out around A.D. 1500, I had hoped anxiously from the beginning that they would be onto the fundamentals of capitalism more quickly. No such luck (perhaps a bad case of cultural lag, hard to say). I kept sending them messages on the subject, reviewing the work of Ricardo, Smith, J.S. Mill, and Karl Marx for them, discussing the theory of surplus value, adding in Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and the like, but they seemed to be clinging to the theory of clinging: if we hang on to our money, we’ll be OK. So they kept squeezing quarters till the eagles screamed. But finally—it may have been the winter storms in New Jersey, or the flooding that subsequently occurred there, or maybe a stray lightning bolt—they woke up one morning and said, “Let’s give the poor shmuck (i.e., me) a publicist.” When I heard that they had actually hired someone, and were even going to pay her—i.e., actual money; this was not a barter in New Jersey corn or whatever—I had to lie down for a couple of hours just to recover from the shock. Maybe there is a god, I thought; maybe he likes my books. (I was heavily sedated at the time.)
Anyway, that’s Step 1 in this strange adventure. Step 2: my new publicist says to me: what’s really crucial these days are the social media. Things such as magazines, reviews, bookstore presentations, radio and TV interviews—all of that has shrunk in influence, been marginalized. Americans don’t really read that much anymore (as you’ve documented in your previous books); instead, they Twitter and Facebook, so that’s where you’ve gotta be.
Me: But if they don’t read any more, aren’t they the wrong audience for us? I mean, let’s say you take stuff off my blog and put it on Twit and FB (since I’m not going to Twit or Face myself, because I have no interest in those social media, which I think should really be called anti-social media, and think they were designed for addicted, narcissistic morons whose main interest in life revolves around stuff like the fotos Kim Kardashian posted of her psoriasis, not to mention her rear end). Those folks aren’t going to run out and read WAF; no way! For one thing, it has polysyllabic words in it, not to mention—gasp—concepts. And then these media reduce one’s attention span to that of a gnat. It’s not merely that these people don’t read books anymore; they can’t.
Publicist: Not so fast, shmendrick. For better or worse, most Americans now get their information from the web, and this even includes a few intellectuals. The social media reach millions; there’s no such thing now as book promotion without them. We need the folks who are reading your book to be out there talking about it, and one place we can be sure to find them is online. In short, adapt or die, boychik.
Me: But what about the bookstores? Isn’t anyone going to show up to hear me at bookstores?
Publicist (shaking her ahead, in the sense of ‘What a yokel’): You’ll be lucky if you pull in 5 people in Seattle and 10 in LA. Don’t forget your famous appearance in downtown Philly in 2006: 3 people showed up for your talk, and one of them fell asleep during it. The bookstore also had you billed as “Dean of Optometry at UC Fullerton,” or something like that. It can’t get much worse than that, can it?
Me: Yeah, that was indeed a humbling moment, I have to admit. So your idea is that for the next two months I post various rants and raves on any subject I want, including Twit and FB and Kim’s behind, and then you feed these things into Twit and FB, in the hope that someone who reads it will also want to read WAF? Shit, I’d rather chew on razor blades. As far as I’m concerned, Twit and FB are further examples of the collapse of American culture, of our national decline. As someone recently said, screen people are “pancake people”—all breadth and no depth.
Publicist: Perhaps, but it still makes for good PR. Even anti-PR is good PR.
Me: Were you aware that a Canadian company just released a computer tablet for toddlers, designed for babies as young as one week old? It’s not enough that we are killing our infants with Prozac and Zoloft; now we are also going to do them in with screens and touch pads.
Publicist: That’s good! Write about that! Tell your blogfolks (all 65 of them; what a huge following you’ve managed to accumulate!) that the US and Canada, through meds and hi-tech, are deliberately trying to kill our children. I mean, even if it isn’t an actual conspiracy, it seems like they’re doing a good job of it, no? You remember that essay by Jonathan Swift, right? About how Ireland should start cooking and eating its children? Well, do a new post and call it “Jonathan Swift Revisited.” That’ll get the pancakes all a-Twittering.
Me: (Heavy sigh)
Publicist: Frankly, I’m a believer in Bermanism: any culture that is designing computer screens for one-week old babies, and feeding anti-depressants to toddlers, has no future at all. What could be more obvious? When they grow up, they won’t even know what a book is, fer chrissakes.
Me: Jesus…Well, this seems like a fool’s errand, but you’re the publicist, what can I say.
Publicist: You got that right. Now get busy, shmuck. And don’t forget to give your readers the crucial contact info:
Facebook: Whyamericafailed
Twitter: @Yamericafailed
OK, gather round, you DAA-ers; time to give you the low-down on publicity for WAF. It seems that Wiley, my publisher, finally came to the realization that in order to make money, you’ve got to spend it. Since Western Europe figured this out around A.D. 1500, I had hoped anxiously from the beginning that they would be onto the fundamentals of capitalism more quickly. No such luck (perhaps a bad case of cultural lag, hard to say). I kept sending them messages on the subject, reviewing the work of Ricardo, Smith, J.S. Mill, and Karl Marx for them, discussing the theory of surplus value, adding in Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and the like, but they seemed to be clinging to the theory of clinging: if we hang on to our money, we’ll be OK. So they kept squeezing quarters till the eagles screamed. But finally—it may have been the winter storms in New Jersey, or the flooding that subsequently occurred there, or maybe a stray lightning bolt—they woke up one morning and said, “Let’s give the poor shmuck (i.e., me) a publicist.” When I heard that they had actually hired someone, and were even going to pay her—i.e., actual money; this was not a barter in New Jersey corn or whatever—I had to lie down for a couple of hours just to recover from the shock. Maybe there is a god, I thought; maybe he likes my books. (I was heavily sedated at the time.)
Anyway, that’s Step 1 in this strange adventure. Step 2: my new publicist says to me: what’s really crucial these days are the social media. Things such as magazines, reviews, bookstore presentations, radio and TV interviews—all of that has shrunk in influence, been marginalized. Americans don’t really read that much anymore (as you’ve documented in your previous books); instead, they Twitter and Facebook, so that’s where you’ve gotta be.
Me: But if they don’t read any more, aren’t they the wrong audience for us? I mean, let’s say you take stuff off my blog and put it on Twit and FB (since I’m not going to Twit or Face myself, because I have no interest in those social media, which I think should really be called anti-social media, and think they were designed for addicted, narcissistic morons whose main interest in life revolves around stuff like the fotos Kim Kardashian posted of her psoriasis, not to mention her rear end). Those folks aren’t going to run out and read WAF; no way! For one thing, it has polysyllabic words in it, not to mention—gasp—concepts. And then these media reduce one’s attention span to that of a gnat. It’s not merely that these people don’t read books anymore; they can’t.
Publicist: Not so fast, shmendrick. For better or worse, most Americans now get their information from the web, and this even includes a few intellectuals. The social media reach millions; there’s no such thing now as book promotion without them. We need the folks who are reading your book to be out there talking about it, and one place we can be sure to find them is online. In short, adapt or die, boychik.
Me: But what about the bookstores? Isn’t anyone going to show up to hear me at bookstores?
Publicist (shaking her ahead, in the sense of ‘What a yokel’): You’ll be lucky if you pull in 5 people in Seattle and 10 in LA. Don’t forget your famous appearance in downtown Philly in 2006: 3 people showed up for your talk, and one of them fell asleep during it. The bookstore also had you billed as “Dean of Optometry at UC Fullerton,” or something like that. It can’t get much worse than that, can it?
Me: Yeah, that was indeed a humbling moment, I have to admit. So your idea is that for the next two months I post various rants and raves on any subject I want, including Twit and FB and Kim’s behind, and then you feed these things into Twit and FB, in the hope that someone who reads it will also want to read WAF? Shit, I’d rather chew on razor blades. As far as I’m concerned, Twit and FB are further examples of the collapse of American culture, of our national decline. As someone recently said, screen people are “pancake people”—all breadth and no depth.
Publicist: Perhaps, but it still makes for good PR. Even anti-PR is good PR.
Me: Were you aware that a Canadian company just released a computer tablet for toddlers, designed for babies as young as one week old? It’s not enough that we are killing our infants with Prozac and Zoloft; now we are also going to do them in with screens and touch pads.
Publicist: That’s good! Write about that! Tell your blogfolks (all 65 of them; what a huge following you’ve managed to accumulate!) that the US and Canada, through meds and hi-tech, are deliberately trying to kill our children. I mean, even if it isn’t an actual conspiracy, it seems like they’re doing a good job of it, no? You remember that essay by Jonathan Swift, right? About how Ireland should start cooking and eating its children? Well, do a new post and call it “Jonathan Swift Revisited.” That’ll get the pancakes all a-Twittering.
Me: (Heavy sigh)
Publicist: Frankly, I’m a believer in Bermanism: any culture that is designing computer screens for one-week old babies, and feeding anti-depressants to toddlers, has no future at all. What could be more obvious? When they grow up, they won’t even know what a book is, fer chrissakes.
Me: Jesus…Well, this seems like a fool’s errand, but you’re the publicist, what can I say.
Publicist: You got that right. Now get busy, shmuck. And don’t forget to give your readers the crucial contact info:
Facebook: Whyamericafailed
Twitter: @Yamericafailed
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