In Treatment

Dear Wafers, and Waferettes:

I was planning to post the following essay on this blog after I gave it as a talk for book promo for Spinning Straw Into Gold. I wrote several bookstores in New York and Los Angeles, but they had no interest in hosting me (most didn't bother to write back). So...might as well give up on that, and post it now. Hope you guys enjoy it, in any case.

In a similar vein...as you all can imagine, I don't get a lot of invitations to speak in the U.S., for some odd reason, but I do have one nice assignment coming up, namely a lecture at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA on Nov. 19. It will be held at 5 p.m. in the Northen Auditorium of the Leyburn Library, for those of you within striking distance of Lexington, and who might wish to attend.

And now, without further ado, the essay:

In Treatment was an HBO TV series that debuted in 2008 and ran for three seasons, starring Gabriel Byrne in the role of a psychotherapist named Paul Weston. It was based on an Israeli series of the same name (Be Tipul, in Hebrew); apparently, many of the episodes were verbatim translations of the Hebrew originals. Personally, I found the show highly addictive. Dr. Weston has a veritable parade of troubled patients traipse through his office, and their problems are unfailingly gripping, even mesmerizing. He seems to be a good therapist, although the results are rather mixed: some folks improve, some seem to go nowhere, one may have even “accidentally” committed suicide (triggering a lawsuit from the dead patient’s father). But the most powerful aspect of the show is that in the fullness of time, nothing is quite what it seemed to be. Paul’s own therapist (played by Dianne Wiest) seems to be empathic and supportive, but winds up using Paul as material for a novel she writes, in which the “Paul” character is cast in a very bad light. One of Paul’s patients, an Indian man living in an unhappy situation with his son and daughter-in-law, tricks Paul into getting him deported back to Calcutta, which is where he wants to be. Paul falls in love with his second (and final) therapist (played by Amy Ryan), but knowing how the mechanism of transference works, can’t decide if it’s love or illusion. What she gets him to see, in the course of a few weeks of therapy with her, is that he has spent his entire career getting over-involved with his patients as a substitute for having a life of his own. At age 57, the ground has shifted from under his feet; he has no way of knowing what is true and what is invented, and as he tells his therapist, “I’ve lost my way.” He even wonders if he ever loved his ex-wife, or whether he is capable of love at all.

The final session is a tour de force by virtue of being anti-climactic. Paul ends his therapy and walks out into the Brooklyn night, having nowhere to go and nothing to do. This is as un-Hollywood as it gets: no satisfying wrap-up, no happy ending, just a state of wandering through the world with no meaning and no sense of direction. The most one can extract from this last scene, if one insists on being optimistic, is the Socratic dictum, “Ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.” Maybe. But for the time being, existential loss is just that—loss. The gray night of the soul, perhaps, except that to me, the non-resolution of the story had an almost religious quality to it.

Which is probably why I watched the last episode several times, on DVD. I had been in Paul’s situation at age 28, when I came to the conclusion that my academic career was a farce; or at least, unreal. I remember I was living in England, on leave from my university in the United States to write my first book, and a British graduate student came to see me for advice about his research and his career. I can’t remember what I told him, but I remember feeling hollow, formulaic. Could I encourage him to pursue something that I no longer believed in? It was late afternoon by the time he left, and it was already starting to get dark. I sat in my chair and looked out across the room, feeling depressed. I had no idea what life was about, or how I might ever feel happy again. I felt like an empty shell. As the months passed, the dark night of the soul became increasingly dark.

How all that got turned around is another story, and a rather involved one, best saved for another time. But in a nutshell, it involved faith, which to me meant betting everything on something that was invisible, and in contemporary American culture very much of a long shot. Not God, I hasten to add; but definitely something involving the life of the spirit. I guess, at the end of the final episode of In Treatment, I wanted to pull Dr. Weston into a nearby café and talk to him about belief. Why, I’m not sure. Perhaps because he’s such a sympathetic, earnest, and honest character; perhaps because I felt that people with that level of integrity deserve a good life. Perhaps because I would have felt lucky to have had him as a therapist, or at least, a friend. I really don’t know. But belief is not really transferable, in any case. It’s hardly a matter of an intellectual decision, but rather something that emerges from your body, in a visceral way. There are no shortcuts in the life of the spirit, as it turns out; each of us has to find our own way.

I guess it says something that In Treatment ran for three seasons. Americans are not big on ambiguity, or non-resolution, after all; they aren’t a terribly sophisticated people, in my experience. But are Israelis so different? I guess I would have to say yes: more honest, more in-your-face. Two Israeli films come to mind that have this quality of non-resolution, and are (like Be Tipul) very powerful because of it. The first I saw about twenty or thirty years ago, and can’t recall the name; but it involved a New Age guru living in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, and his devoted followers, who come to his apartment once a week for a group session. The guru, meanwhile, gets increasingly wigged out, until he finally becomes convinced (inasmuch as everything is supposedly in the mind) that he can fly. So he jumps off the roof of his apartment building, only to discover that gravity has other plans for him. In the wake of his death, his disciples are not able to put their shattered lives back together, and become like the children of Israel, wandering through the desert, but without Moses to guide them. I found it a very courageous film.

The second film is called The Footnote (2011), starring Shlomo Bar Aba and Lior Ashkenazi as a father and son caught up in an epic Oedipal struggle. I won’t bother to recap the story here, except to say that it ends on a huge existential question mark. The moment of truth has arrived in the relationship, and it is up to the father to bite the bullet or cop out, in accepting or not accepting a prestigious award that was actually meant for his son. As he is in line to be called and walk up to the podium, the film ends. It’s unclear what he is going to do. (At this point I had actually stopped breathing.) All three of these stories—Be Tipul, the flying guru, and The Footnote, affected me very deeply, and in recent weeks I’ve been trying to figure out why. Because they are Israeli, and I’m Jewish? Nah, that didn’t really ring true. And then it hit me: all of them involve uncertainty. Of course, if you were to ask me how I feel about uncertainty, I would tell you that I hate it; but I’m not sure I do. I may not love it, but I’m certainly intrigued by it. My first memory, at age two-and-a-half, was precisely about this theme; and I recall that Camus wrote somewhere that our first conscious moment contains the issue that we will dance around for the rest of our lives. As one psychoanalyst puts it, the infant’s first sensory experiences presage the way he or she will view and construct the external world. But here’s the catch: the external world that we seek out is in synchrony with our first sensory experiences; and if those experiences are, for example, ones of uncertainty, then what the adult will seek out—for comfort(!)—is uncertainty. This, then, is a paradoxical type of harmony, what this psychologist calls “primal confusion,” or the paradox of finding solace in uncertainty.

In the Jewish tradition, when you paint your house, you are supposed to leave a small but visible section of one of the interior walls blank. The idea is that only God is perfect, so it’s important for us humans to be imperfect as a reminder of this. I believe there is a similar tradition in Navajo weaving, of leaving one strand loose, unwoven, so that there is a place for the Great Spirit to enter. And the asymmetry of Japanese art may be based on the same sort of premise. Uncertainty—things out of order, out of kilter, unfinished and incomplete—is, on this interpretation, a great gift. Dr. Weston left the therapist’s office to float around Brooklyn like a rudderless ship; but if his therapist was right, he had never really lived an authentic life, and now that terrifying opportunity had been presented to him. Ditto, the devotees of the flying guru. And something similar is going on at the end of The Footnote, where the father could, if he chose, abandon his need for a hollow Oedipal victory and come clean—in public, no less.

I have not enjoyed uncertainty in my life; I have endlessly pursued ways to be able to stand on terra firma. But I have never escaped the aura of that first primal awareness, which stimulated me to search for the sources of security in human life for the next sixty-seven years. Nor is it an accident that my current research is on Japanese culture, which is based, like karate, on the creativity of empty space—the “meaning of meaninglessness,” as one Japanese philosopher called it. I have always envied those who were blessed with a deep sense of security, who moved through life free of anxiety—or so it seemed. I guess I still do. But there is no getting around it: for better or worse, without uncertainty I wouldn’t be, to quote the epitaph on Kierkegaard’s tombstone, that individual.

©Morris Berman, 2013

Mene mene tekel upharsin

Hola Wafers!

Not much to say this time around, except to urge all of you to keep in mind that (a) the president is a douche bag, and (b) he is the best the U.S. can come up with these days in terms of leadership. Handwriting is on the wall, amigos.

mb

Preface to the Chinese Edition of "Why America Failed"

Dear Wafers:

The Mandarin translation of Why America Failedis scheduled to appear in September, and the editors asked me to write a preface for it, directed to the Chinese reader. I take the liberty of posting it a little ahead of schedule, as a Wafer-bonus. Hope you enjoy it, and sheh-sheh(= thank you in Mandarin), as always, for your support.

-M. Belman

Let me begin by expressing my gratitude to the Beijing World Publishing Corporation for undertaking a translation of my book Why America Failed. I am honored by their decision to do this, and excited at the prospect of the book having a Chinese readership. Because this readership is not likely to be acquainted with my work, let me begin by providing a context for this book.

Why America Failedis the third in a trilogy on the decline of the American empire. It was a fairly radical notion when the first volume of the series appeared in the year 2000, under the title The Twilight of American Culture. First, because most Americans did not think of their country in terms of an empire, and second because they certainly didn’t think of it as disintegrating, as being in a state of decline. The comparison I made in that book was between contemporary America and Rome in the late empire period, and I showed that in structural terms, the factors that led to the collapse of Rome were present in full force in the United States. Furthermore, that these dangers were being ignored—in particular, the growing gap between rich and poor. It was for these reasons, I argued, that the American experiment had entered its “twilight” phase, and was now coming to an end.

The second volume in the series, Dark Ages America(2006), focused on U.S. foreign policy, showing how self-destructive it was. In the grip of a strange ideology that America had to be the model for the rest of the world, and that all other nations needed to get on board the ship of laissez-faire corporate-consumer capitalism, the United States had imposed its will on nation after nation, frequently overthrowing democratically elected governments in the pursuit of its commercial and geopolitical goals. What usually followed in the wake of this destabilizing activity was the installation of governments favorable to American capitalism, typically accompanied by the torture and massacre of huge numbers of the population (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, etc.). The result, to use the jargon of the CIA, was “blowback,” the retaliation of those who had been oppressed by this barbarism (to call it by its true name). American meddling in the Middle East, I showed, had been going on for some time, and it was hardly surprising that rage against the U.S. boiled over into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. What then ensued was a “war on terror” that by definition has no end point, is bleeding the nation dry, and has led to the elimination of most of the civil liberties once guaranteed by the Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the Constitution). Self-destruction indeed.

The Twilight of American Cultureand Dark Ages Americawere, in effect, waving a red flag, attempting to tell the U.S. government, and the American people, “Stop doing these things; you are driving the country into a ditch.” Of course, I never expected that anyone would pay any attention to me; I’m not a prominent intellectual figure in the United States, and even if I were, it still wouldn’t make any difference. Because the historical record is that no empire that has entered its twilight phase stops, takes stock of what it is doing, and then attempts to reverse its trajectory. In fact, as students of civilization such as Arnold Toynbee have pointed out, the usual pattern is to pursue precisely those actions that will accelerate the decline. In this regard, the U.S. has been depressingly exemplary.

And so, understanding that it was basically Game Over for the United States, in 2011 I published the third and final volume in the series, Why America Failed. This was not intended to be a red flag or warning of any sort; as far as I could see, things were too far gone for that. WAF, as I like to call it, is just a post mortem; an analysis of why the U.S. sank into the ocean, and was swallowed up by the waves. In a nutshell, it’s this: from the very beginning, America had only one idea, or ideology, and that was hustling—making money (what Thomas Jefferson euphemistically called “the pursuit of happiness”). There was, however, an alternative tradition (the original title of the book was Capitalism and Its Discontents), represented by the Puritan divines, various religious-utopian communities, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Vance Packard, Lewis Mumford, and even President Jimmy Carter, to name but a few. But this tradition was ignored or marginalized; it was regarded at best as “quaint.” The problem is that hustling cannot serve as a social glue for a society; in fact, given its essentially competitive nature, it really is a type of anti-glue.

American society is based on the notion of every man for himself; things such as friendship, trust, community, craft, meaningful work, family, and spirituality—the key components of a meaningful life, which the alternative tradition kept arguing for—were (and are) pushed aside in the scramble for money, status, and fame. The result is that nearly one out of five Americans is now unemployed, 1% of the population owns something like 40% of the wealth, and for the most part, our citizens are lonely and miserable (though they try to put a brave face on it). The national debt is now up to $17 trillion and growing by the day. Libraries and bookstores and newspapers close, cities go bankrupt, the educational system is in a shambles, as is the infrastructure, and the prison system incarcerates 25% of the prison population of the entire world. We are less than 5% of the world’s population, yet consume something like 66% of its anti-depressant drugs, and our divorce rates and homicide rates are through the roof. And this is the model, the paradigm, that a dying nation is seeking to export to the rest of the world.

Amazingly enough, the People’s Republic of China have bought into this! Instead of taking a close look at America and saying, “Thanks but no thanks,” the Chinese decided that imitating the United States was what it was all about. And so they couldn’t produce enough cars, enough TV sets, enough washing machines. They couldn’t industrialize fast enough (and to hell with the environmental costs of that). “To get rich is glorious!” (致富光荣—zhìfù guāngróng) Deng Xiaoping supposedly proclaimed in 1978, and the Chinese fell over themselves in the pursuit of wealth. In effect, the country became the United States in Mandarin. As in the U.S., the upper 1% holds roughly 40% of the nation’s wealth. Extreme luxury, especially in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, contrasts with abject poverty, particularly in rural areas, and those urban areas are ringed with slums that get larger with each passing month. A dinner at a fancy restaurant in Beijing can cost the equivalent of a peasant’s six-month income. Meanwhile, you’ve got Foxconn assembly line workers jumping out of windows to their deaths, and the company responding by installing netting outside the windows. The famous “trickle down” theory of Ronald Reagan, which was little more than a scam in the United States, has not panned out in China either: very little has trickled down; and a survey conducted in 2010 by a Beijing research group showed a serious drop in life satisfaction and confidence in China’s future from previous years.

Of course, much of the aggressive pursuit of wealth has been reactive on China’s part. After three decades of Maoism and enforced equality, opening the doors to individual ambition must have come as a great relief. What good is equality, after all, if everyone is going to be poor? But the reaction proved to be an over-reaction, 35 years after Deng’s proclamation: what good is inequality, if the country is run by a tiny, super-rich elite and the rest of the nation has to scramble to survive—as is the case in the United States? What we need to see is that growth, in and of itself, is not only not the answer; it is in fact the problem. Since virtually nothing trickles down, financial growth only leads to greater social inequality; and in addition, the strain on the environment is enormous: we do not live in a world of infinite resources, much as we like to pretend that the gravy train will go on forever. But above all, one cannot create a viable society out of hustling and competition: this is the great lesson that the failure of the United States has to teach the rest of the world, China included. There has to be a deeper set of values than wealth and accumulation, and it has to be spiritually real. The Chinese government likes to talk in terms of wa, harmony—it’s a word that keeps popping up in practically every official document—but what does it really mean? On what is it actually based? If it amounts to nothing more than a kind of obligatory Confucian conformism, so that no dissent or individual choice is tolerated, then this is a very empty kind of spirituality.

At the present moment we live in a multi-polar world, with the United States, China, and the European Union sharing the balance of power. It may not stay that way. Internal U.S. government memos have predicted that China will probably edge out America militarily in the Pacific Rim by 2025; and economically, we are on very shaky ground, with China holding $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes and bonds. So it wouldn’t surprise me if China will outstrip the U.S. in terms of military and economic strength within my lifetime. But to what end? As an analysis and post mortem of what went wrong with America, Why America Failed could conceivably be a wake-up call for the PRC.

Why do I have the feeling that’s not going to happen?

©Morris Berman, 2013

The Huff Post Review of SSIG

Wafers! This just in:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-van-buren/morris-berman-spinning-straw-into-gold_b_3822936.html

Enjoy!

-mb

Dark Day for America

It's no-holds-barred now, my friends:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bradley_manning_and_the_gangster_state_20130821/

Not much else to say.

Interview with the Atlantic Monthly

Dear Wafers/Waferettes:

This was for the online edition of The Atlantic, on the occasion of the publication of Spinning Straw Into Gold. Hope you enjoy it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/how-americas-culture-of-hustling-is-dark-and-empty/278601/