Dear Friends,
I was recently contacted by a reporter for the New York Times, who asked me to clarify the relationship between culture and politics. Below, my reply.--mb
Dear Kirk,
Thank you for writing. Yours is a great question, both in the sense of being very important, and in the sense of being vast. In fact, to provide you with a decent reply, I think I'd need to go off and do about six years of research, and I'm guessing your deadline is a bit sooner than that. The problem here is that there is no definitive pattern, or even set of patterns, I know of, for the relationship between culture and politics. In some cases, it makes no difference at all that I can see: the British decision of a few years back to outlaw fox hunting, for example. A similar ban in NYC, a few years ago, on smoking in bars and restaurants. There is a lot of stuff in that category.
At the other extreme, we might consider the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th century, or in contemporary Northern Ireland. These are/were cultural conflicts with huge political consequences, quite obviously. Hatred of Jews in Germany during the 1930s, and the cultural campaign against them; e.g. movies (which I've seen) comparing Jews to insects, crawling through sacks of wheat, poisoning the food supply, i.e. the larger "healthy" German culture. As one historian famously remarked, "ideas have consequences."
As for the things you point to, such as capital punishment or homosexual marriage, I could offer some guesses, but that's all they would be.
I do, however, know of one pattern by which culture impacts politics, a pattern identified by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the phrase, "defining deviancy down." In other words, what is socially unacceptable at one point, becomes perfectly OK--or at least, tolerated--a decade or so later. I used to ride the Metro quite often when I lived in Washington, DC, and watched how increasingly, people put their feet up on the seats, or sprawled out on them. Cell phone users could care less who is listening to them, so one now has to suffer through dinner with a friend in a restaurant while 3 feet away, someone is yakking loudly about their personal life. The Met, in NY, used to ban cell phone use in the galleries; now, one has to look at Rembrandt or Van Gogh while someone stands next to you, describing their recent gall bladder operation. Visitors even talk on their phones in St. Patrick's Cathedral. In schools, rudeness to teachers, and violence toward classmates, has become commonplace. Learning for learning's sake is a thing of the past, something "quaint," for patsies. There is a long list of this sort of behavior, and in fact a long list of books on incivility in American life (Stephen Carter's "Civility" is a good place to start).
There is also a large literature documenting a complete lack of interest in community and the larger society in the US, and how, following Moynihan's prescription, this is now taken for granted. The most famous of these is Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (this for the period 1965-95), but you might also check out Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City," among others.
The impact of these things on politics is that politics becomes more or less irrelevant. We don't really have a society any more, so in that context, what is it that politics could possibly accomplish? Most Americans don't vote, and I doubt that very many, in their heart of hearts, really believe things are going to get better over time, regardless of which party is in office. The result of incivility and loss of community, of a world in which (e.g.) violence in our high schools is now regarded as simply a fact of life, and learning and erudition regarded as jokes, is cultural death, cynicism, loss of belief in America at large. "Democracy" becomes little more than a slogan. Bill Clinton or Barack Obama can talk about "hope," but all this is nothing more than empty rhetoric, because there can be no hope in the face of such large-scale solipsism and narcissism. Politics cannot be meaningful when the huge majority of the population has turned away from "the commons," from any participation or even concern about the larger society (which politicians such as Reagan and Thatcher claimed didn't even exist), and into private worlds of shopping, Prozac, TV, the Internet, religious fundamentalism, and the like. And this certainly does constitute an historical pattern, whether we are talking about the end of the Roman Empire, or the disintegration of the American one. Indeed, probably the greatest factor in the collapse of a civilization is spiritual death; and as Moynihan pointed out, we are seeing more and more of it every day.
As for your own question regarding the resolution of all this: take a guess.
Anyway, that's the best I can do on short notice. If there is anything in the above that might be useful to you, feel free to take what you need.
With best wishes,
Morris Berman
December 14, 2007
November 05, 2007
The View from Darien
Dear Friends:
This by way of a change of pace...My German publisher wrote to say that he is going to be editing a book of short contributions by writers, journalists, and actors, on the subject of the first book they ever read, and how it changed their lives. Below, my contribution. Enjoy!
I suppose everybody has a shortlist of books that changed their lives. My own amounts to about 7 or 8 books, I would guess. But there is one that deserves a special place of honor, because it was my first, which I read at age 3: Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. I was reading it with my mother, and we came across a word I didn’t know: eddy. As it turned out, my mother didn’t know it either (or so she said), so we looked it up in the dictionary. "Whirlpool," was the definition. But the fascinating thing that I took away from Defoe’s tale was that one could explore whole new worlds, worlds that were strange and unknown, and that it was not only safe to do so, but even fascinating. Furthermore, there were guides along the way to help you, such as dictionaries. And finally, I had it imprinted on my tender little brain that reading itself was exciting; that it was the key to a larger world.
That sense of revelation stayed with me, and shaped my life. I particularly remember revelations about revelation itself, such as the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," from The Arabian Nights, which I read at age 13. Ali Baba comes to the covered entrance to a cave, and learns the magic words that open the door: "Open Sesame!" Or, in college now, reading John Keats’ poem, "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer," which concludes with the lines:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific–and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
It is now six decades since I first read Robinson Crusoe, and I am still looking out at the world with a wild surmise.
This by way of a change of pace...My German publisher wrote to say that he is going to be editing a book of short contributions by writers, journalists, and actors, on the subject of the first book they ever read, and how it changed their lives. Below, my contribution. Enjoy!
I suppose everybody has a shortlist of books that changed their lives. My own amounts to about 7 or 8 books, I would guess. But there is one that deserves a special place of honor, because it was my first, which I read at age 3: Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. I was reading it with my mother, and we came across a word I didn’t know: eddy. As it turned out, my mother didn’t know it either (or so she said), so we looked it up in the dictionary. "Whirlpool," was the definition. But the fascinating thing that I took away from Defoe’s tale was that one could explore whole new worlds, worlds that were strange and unknown, and that it was not only safe to do so, but even fascinating. Furthermore, there were guides along the way to help you, such as dictionaries. And finally, I had it imprinted on my tender little brain that reading itself was exciting; that it was the key to a larger world.
That sense of revelation stayed with me, and shaped my life. I particularly remember revelations about revelation itself, such as the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," from The Arabian Nights, which I read at age 13. Ali Baba comes to the covered entrance to a cave, and learns the magic words that open the door: "Open Sesame!" Or, in college now, reading John Keats’ poem, "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer," which concludes with the lines:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific–and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
It is now six decades since I first read Robinson Crusoe, and I am still looking out at the world with a wild surmise.
October 23, 2007
"A Public Affair"
Dear Friends,
I just did an hour-long interview with WORT-FM in Madison, WI, that might interest you. I haven't tried it myself, but the host told me after the show that the program could be downloaded by going to www.wortfm.org, clicking on Archives, and then going to the listing for "A Public Affair," 23 October 2007. I personally felt the hour went by in the blink of an eye. Most of the time is devoted to call-ins and my responses. Enjoy!
-mb
I just did an hour-long interview with WORT-FM in Madison, WI, that might interest you. I haven't tried it myself, but the host told me after the show that the program could be downloaded by going to www.wortfm.org, clicking on Archives, and then going to the listing for "A Public Affair," 23 October 2007. I personally felt the hour went by in the blink of an eye. Most of the time is devoted to call-ins and my responses. Enjoy!
-mb
July 27, 2007
Interview on WYNE-FM, 23 July 2007
This is an interview I did with Gary Null, on New York's local NPR station. Link as follows:
http://media.podcastingmanager.com/86473-83093/Media/600100.null072307.mp3
http://media.podcastingmanager.com/86473-83093/Media/600100.null072307.mp3
June 13, 2007
Interview on WYPR-FM, 11 June 2007
Dear Friends:
Here is the link to an hour-long interview I did on the Marc Steiner Show, on Baltimore's NPR station, WYPR-FM. Note that it took me 25 mins. to download this; I sincerely hope your own computer is faster! As follows:
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wypr/local-wypr-597016.mp3
Here is the link to an hour-long interview I did on the Marc Steiner Show, on Baltimore's NPR station, WYPR-FM. Note that it took me 25 mins. to download this; I sincerely hope your own computer is faster! As follows:
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wypr/local-wypr-597016.mp3
May 30, 2007
Review of DAA in the New Haven Review of Books, June 2007
HOW BAD IS IT?
In 1984 Ronald Reagan announced, with characteristic indifference to fact, that it was "morning in America." A quarter-century later, the twilight, then already perceptible, has deepened. The international financial position of the United States is ruinous. Globally, attitudes toward American policy range from misgiving to loathing. The foreseeable consequences of climate change and environmental pollution range from painful to catastrophic. For most Americans (especially the tens of millions without health insurance), medical care is the worst in any advanced industrial society. Economic insecurity is epidemic; overwork and high stress are the rule rather than the exception; inequality is at an all-time high; trust in government is at an all-time low (though perhaps not low enough, in the present circumstances). The (until recently) governing party openly aspires to permanent one-party rule and a Caesarist executive. Civic virtue, lately renamed "social capital," is waning; neighborliness has dwindled to the point of near-anomie. Functional illiteracy is rampant: in most non-affluent school districts, the public schools are not merely ineffectual but often unsafe as well. Nearly half of all Americans believe that the earth is 10,000 years old or less and that angels and other supernatural beings regularly intervene in terrestrial affairs. The average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, thirty seconds attending a play or concert, twenty-five seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television. And even Americans who don’t watch television are perfused by a stream of commercial messages so intense and ubiquitous as to constitute a culture (in the biological as well as social sense) of consumption. Compared with the imagined noonday brilliance of that vibrant idyll, Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, the prospects for contemporary American civilization are heartbreakingly bleak.
Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (Norton) was one of the most important books published in 2006, though little noted thanks to a peevish and uncomprehending review by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. It is a sequel to Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture (2000), a shorter, more impressionistic book that persuasively evoked contemporary parallels to the collapse of Roman imperial civilization and suggested that, like the Greco-Roman heritage, Enlightenment ideals may survive the coming era of globalized barbarism underground, in quasi-monastic networks and communities.
Although the play of "twilight" and "dark" in the two books’ titles implies forward (or backward) motion, Dark Ages America does not try to go beyond The Twilight of American Culture so much as underneath it. The earlier book was primarily descriptive; the new one is diagnostic as well. Berman is a distinguished historian of medieval and early modern culture, and he imports from his study of alchemy the maxim: as above, so below. That is, the macrocosm and the microcosm – the visible dynamics of global political economy and the subtleties of culture and social psychology; grand strategy and the grain of everyday life – reflect and determine each other.
Thus, for example, the unrestricted movement of capital, the ultima ratio of American foreign and domestic policy, requires weak or corrupt – in any case, acquiescent – governments, since otherwise they might try to improve their bargaining position by combining with other governments and encouraging labor organization. Ineffectual governments and labor unions in turn require a weakening of impulses toward cooperation, solidarity, and citizen initiative. Very helpful toward that end is the redefinition of the good life as a life of continuous and increasing individual consumption – which, since it is a false definition, necessitates unremitting indoctrination by means of advertising. Expanding consumption in turn requires technological innovation, mass production, a population willing to put up with insecure, regimented, and frequently stupefying work (the effects of which are assuaged by entertainments only a little more refined and wholesome than Roman circuses), and the exploitation of resources on a vast scale. And these requirements of expanding consumption in turn promote the concentration and mobility of capital. In Berman’s apt formulation: "Global process, local fallout."
Whether or not the elites who profit by the degradation of culture and character intend these consequences, or even perceive them, is beside the point. Whatever anyone may intend, forms of life produce individuals adapted to them, just as physical environments do. "Civilizations are a package deal," Berman observes. Much of the value of Dark Ages America lies in tracing the adaptations and interdependencies implicit in the civilization we have evolved.
The ethos of American individualism is Berman’s particular preoccupation. It has frontier roots but is also an effect (as well as a contributing cause) of the victory of automobiles and suburbanization over mass transit and European-style city planning. "The relentless American habit of choosing the individual solution over the collective one," Berman writes, underlies "the design of our cities, including the rise of a car culture, the growth of the suburbs, and the nature of our architecture, [which] has had an overwhelming impact on the life of the nation as a whole, reflecting back on all the issues discussed [in this book]: work, children, media, community, economy, technology, globalization, and, especially, US foreign policy. The physical arrangements of our lives mirror the spiritual ones."
American foreign policy all too clearly expresses this preference for "individual solutions over collective ones." The basic principle of world order – willingness to accept limits on national sovereignty in deference to international law and public opinion – has always been unpopular here. As a result, American international behavior has been so high-handed that, even among normally sympathetic foreign elites, the US is widely regarded as a rogue nation and the chief threat to global peace and welfare. And individualism affects the substance as well as the style of US foreign policy. The culture of cars, suburbs, and shopping is resource-intensive, and in particular, energy-intensive. Control of global energy resources has therefore been the linchpin of US policy since World War II, as Berman shows.
From macrocosm to microcosm: the texture of daily life and the contours of individual psychology within a civilization are intimately related to its science and technology. In the first chapter of Dark Ages America, Berman elaborates a concept borrowed from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: "liquid modernity." This names a society "characterized by speed, fluidity, and transience … a permanent state of contingency." It’s true that this acceleration has been underway since the Industrial Revolution and that Marx discoursed brilliantly on it in the Communist Manifesto. But the pace of social change has increased exponentially in the last few decades, thanks to both computer technology and the demise of the Bretton Woods international economic order, which freed capital to move around the world instantaneously. Along with all the blessings of electronic technology have come enormous, unprecedented stresses on our psyches and metabolisms. "Everything in contemporary society discourages inwardness," the literary critic Sven Birkerts has written. Berman illustrates copiously.
Dark Ages America is a synthesis. All the elements of Berman’s critique have been made before, though they are assembled here with rare skill and comprehensiveness. What is perhaps most original is Berman’s frank admission that he sees no way out. Indignation is usually followed by exhortation, but not in this book or its predecessor. It’s not that Berman sees nothing valuable in contemporary American society and no one struggling against the trends he has identified. He simply doesn’t hold out much hope for them. He regrets John Kerry’s defeat and no doubt welcomed the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006; but he also points out that "in the process of decline a civilization may, from time to time, rally for a while; but it is the overall trajectory, the structural properties of the situation, that ultimately determine the outcome."
Just what form the new Dark Ages may take does not emerge from Berman’s account. Contrary to fashionable demurrers, the Dark Ages were indeed dark: a half-millennium-long, nearly complete eclipse of reason, which classical culture barely and fortuitously survived. It is bound to be different this time around. Then, the imagination was starved; now it will be smothered: by commercial images, by ersatz sensations, by media babble, by corporate and governmental doublespeak. Still, we have at least learned a lot about information storage and retrieval. Maybe those skills will also prove useful for imagination storage and retrieval.
It is not much easier to accept the death of one’s culture than one’s own death – harder, perhaps, if one has had a happy life and known intellectual or aesthetic pleasure. That is why Berman wrote this book, though convinced of its futility. Thankfully, he cites a few lines from the ending of Gore Vidal’s Julian that temper the pain a little:
"With Julian, the light went out, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of time’s mystery and man’s love of light."
--George Scialabba is a book critic and the author of Divided Mind (Arrowsmith Press).
In 1984 Ronald Reagan announced, with characteristic indifference to fact, that it was "morning in America." A quarter-century later, the twilight, then already perceptible, has deepened. The international financial position of the United States is ruinous. Globally, attitudes toward American policy range from misgiving to loathing. The foreseeable consequences of climate change and environmental pollution range from painful to catastrophic. For most Americans (especially the tens of millions without health insurance), medical care is the worst in any advanced industrial society. Economic insecurity is epidemic; overwork and high stress are the rule rather than the exception; inequality is at an all-time high; trust in government is at an all-time low (though perhaps not low enough, in the present circumstances). The (until recently) governing party openly aspires to permanent one-party rule and a Caesarist executive. Civic virtue, lately renamed "social capital," is waning; neighborliness has dwindled to the point of near-anomie. Functional illiteracy is rampant: in most non-affluent school districts, the public schools are not merely ineffectual but often unsafe as well. Nearly half of all Americans believe that the earth is 10,000 years old or less and that angels and other supernatural beings regularly intervene in terrestrial affairs. The average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, thirty seconds attending a play or concert, twenty-five seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television. And even Americans who don’t watch television are perfused by a stream of commercial messages so intense and ubiquitous as to constitute a culture (in the biological as well as social sense) of consumption. Compared with the imagined noonday brilliance of that vibrant idyll, Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, the prospects for contemporary American civilization are heartbreakingly bleak.
Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (Norton) was one of the most important books published in 2006, though little noted thanks to a peevish and uncomprehending review by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. It is a sequel to Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture (2000), a shorter, more impressionistic book that persuasively evoked contemporary parallels to the collapse of Roman imperial civilization and suggested that, like the Greco-Roman heritage, Enlightenment ideals may survive the coming era of globalized barbarism underground, in quasi-monastic networks and communities.
Although the play of "twilight" and "dark" in the two books’ titles implies forward (or backward) motion, Dark Ages America does not try to go beyond The Twilight of American Culture so much as underneath it. The earlier book was primarily descriptive; the new one is diagnostic as well. Berman is a distinguished historian of medieval and early modern culture, and he imports from his study of alchemy the maxim: as above, so below. That is, the macrocosm and the microcosm – the visible dynamics of global political economy and the subtleties of culture and social psychology; grand strategy and the grain of everyday life – reflect and determine each other.
Thus, for example, the unrestricted movement of capital, the ultima ratio of American foreign and domestic policy, requires weak or corrupt – in any case, acquiescent – governments, since otherwise they might try to improve their bargaining position by combining with other governments and encouraging labor organization. Ineffectual governments and labor unions in turn require a weakening of impulses toward cooperation, solidarity, and citizen initiative. Very helpful toward that end is the redefinition of the good life as a life of continuous and increasing individual consumption – which, since it is a false definition, necessitates unremitting indoctrination by means of advertising. Expanding consumption in turn requires technological innovation, mass production, a population willing to put up with insecure, regimented, and frequently stupefying work (the effects of which are assuaged by entertainments only a little more refined and wholesome than Roman circuses), and the exploitation of resources on a vast scale. And these requirements of expanding consumption in turn promote the concentration and mobility of capital. In Berman’s apt formulation: "Global process, local fallout."
Whether or not the elites who profit by the degradation of culture and character intend these consequences, or even perceive them, is beside the point. Whatever anyone may intend, forms of life produce individuals adapted to them, just as physical environments do. "Civilizations are a package deal," Berman observes. Much of the value of Dark Ages America lies in tracing the adaptations and interdependencies implicit in the civilization we have evolved.
The ethos of American individualism is Berman’s particular preoccupation. It has frontier roots but is also an effect (as well as a contributing cause) of the victory of automobiles and suburbanization over mass transit and European-style city planning. "The relentless American habit of choosing the individual solution over the collective one," Berman writes, underlies "the design of our cities, including the rise of a car culture, the growth of the suburbs, and the nature of our architecture, [which] has had an overwhelming impact on the life of the nation as a whole, reflecting back on all the issues discussed [in this book]: work, children, media, community, economy, technology, globalization, and, especially, US foreign policy. The physical arrangements of our lives mirror the spiritual ones."
American foreign policy all too clearly expresses this preference for "individual solutions over collective ones." The basic principle of world order – willingness to accept limits on national sovereignty in deference to international law and public opinion – has always been unpopular here. As a result, American international behavior has been so high-handed that, even among normally sympathetic foreign elites, the US is widely regarded as a rogue nation and the chief threat to global peace and welfare. And individualism affects the substance as well as the style of US foreign policy. The culture of cars, suburbs, and shopping is resource-intensive, and in particular, energy-intensive. Control of global energy resources has therefore been the linchpin of US policy since World War II, as Berman shows.
From macrocosm to microcosm: the texture of daily life and the contours of individual psychology within a civilization are intimately related to its science and technology. In the first chapter of Dark Ages America, Berman elaborates a concept borrowed from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: "liquid modernity." This names a society "characterized by speed, fluidity, and transience … a permanent state of contingency." It’s true that this acceleration has been underway since the Industrial Revolution and that Marx discoursed brilliantly on it in the Communist Manifesto. But the pace of social change has increased exponentially in the last few decades, thanks to both computer technology and the demise of the Bretton Woods international economic order, which freed capital to move around the world instantaneously. Along with all the blessings of electronic technology have come enormous, unprecedented stresses on our psyches and metabolisms. "Everything in contemporary society discourages inwardness," the literary critic Sven Birkerts has written. Berman illustrates copiously.
Dark Ages America is a synthesis. All the elements of Berman’s critique have been made before, though they are assembled here with rare skill and comprehensiveness. What is perhaps most original is Berman’s frank admission that he sees no way out. Indignation is usually followed by exhortation, but not in this book or its predecessor. It’s not that Berman sees nothing valuable in contemporary American society and no one struggling against the trends he has identified. He simply doesn’t hold out much hope for them. He regrets John Kerry’s defeat and no doubt welcomed the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006; but he also points out that "in the process of decline a civilization may, from time to time, rally for a while; but it is the overall trajectory, the structural properties of the situation, that ultimately determine the outcome."
Just what form the new Dark Ages may take does not emerge from Berman’s account. Contrary to fashionable demurrers, the Dark Ages were indeed dark: a half-millennium-long, nearly complete eclipse of reason, which classical culture barely and fortuitously survived. It is bound to be different this time around. Then, the imagination was starved; now it will be smothered: by commercial images, by ersatz sensations, by media babble, by corporate and governmental doublespeak. Still, we have at least learned a lot about information storage and retrieval. Maybe those skills will also prove useful for imagination storage and retrieval.
It is not much easier to accept the death of one’s culture than one’s own death – harder, perhaps, if one has had a happy life and known intellectual or aesthetic pleasure. That is why Berman wrote this book, though convinced of its futility. Thankfully, he cites a few lines from the ending of Gore Vidal’s Julian that temper the pain a little:
"With Julian, the light went out, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of time’s mystery and man’s love of light."
--George Scialabba is a book critic and the author of Divided Mind (Arrowsmith Press).
May 14, 2007
May 01, 2007
Massacre at CNN
On 16 April 2007, on the campus of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia, a 23-year-old student, a Korean national by the name of Cho Seung-Hui, shot and killed 32 students and professors, and then shot himself. For the next two weeks, all the major television networks covered the story in detail, and then, as with everything else in the news, it dropped out of sight, in this case being replaced by discussions of profit earnings at Microsoft.
I was traveling through Tabasco and Chiapas (Mexico) during the time, so my only access to information, besides the local newspapers, was CNN. In a weird way, the CNN coverage was as peculiar as the event itself. The focus was entirely on who this person, Cho Seung-Hui, was; the larger context in which the event took place–and there have been quite a few in recent US history–was never even referred to. Of course, if you focus on how aberrant Cho was, then the larger context becomes (supposedly) irrelevant and can be ignored; which is certainly what the media, and the American public, want. So we learned that Cho was Korean, not American; a loner, depressed from an early age; a psychotic, obsessed with death and weaponry (as one sensationalist video, which CNN kept playing over and over, revealed), and so on. CNN also conducted a fatuous interview with Cho's former roommates, trying to probe into his relations with women and his sexual proclivities. Other coverage included the usual handwringing after such incidents, suggestions from some journalists and "experts" that students and professors need to come to classes armed; the appointing of a commission to investigate the event, etc.–the usual suspects, in short, which never amounted to anything in the past and won't this time around either.
CNN did, however, briefly refer to some sort of suicide note left by Cho, in which he apparently talked about the pretensions of the wealthy students at the school, and the "charlatanry" that pervaded the campus. The news network also read an email from someone in Korea, who pointed out that Cho was, green card notwithstanding, an American: he had come to the US with his parents when he was 8 years old, and had thus spent two-thirds of his life in an American context, being exposed to American values. "An incident such as this [massacre]," the writer concluded, "has not occurred in Korea during its 5000-year-long history." This too was passed over by CNN, a topic they obviously preferred not to deal with.
Of course, I never personally saw Cho's suicide note, so I can only guess at what went on in his mind, or what led him to kill 32 innocent people. But the brief reference to the contents of the note, the letter from the Korean writer, and the endless focus on Cho himself as alienated and insane, suggest a few things that were not part of the CNN coverage. To take an extreme analogy, there would seem to be an odd similarity between this coverage and that of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Network news "analysis," if such it can be called, was all about Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta as "evil" and "insane." When Susan Sontag subsequently made a brief comment in the pages of the New Yorker to the effect that US foreign policy might tell us more about the causes of 9/11 than the psyche of Osama bin Laden, a national uproar ensued, in which she was basically branded a traitor. Any serious student of US postwar activity in the Middle East knows that Sontag's comment was totally on target; but the desire of the media, and the American public, to preserve an image of American innocence vs. external evil is too powerful to allow even a hint of an alternative possibility. In the case of the Virginia Tech massacre, I am not (as in the case of 9/11) suggesting that the slaughter of civilians is justified; of course it isn't. But as in the case of Susan Sontag's commentary, I do think that what happened at Virginia Tech might be explicable, and that a deeper understanding of the event beyond "the killer was insane" might be worth having. Consider, then, the following:
1. Cho Seung-Hui, at age 8, left a society that has not had such a civilian incident in its 5000-year history and entered a society in which violence, via movies, television, and basic daily life, is the norm. This was his true socialization as a child, adolescent, and young adult. Just to take one statistical example, a US-Canada survey taken in the year 2000 revealed that while 12% of Canadians said Yes to the question, "Is it acceptable to use violence to get what you want?", 24% of Americans answered in the affirmative. Or if we consider the world data on homicide, the average rate of homicides per 100,000 people in the European Union was 1.7 during 1997-99, while the US rate during the same period was 6.26, or nearly 4 times that number. The homicide rate for American children during that period was 5 times higher than for the children of the next 25 wealthiest nations in the world combined.
2. What Cho also saw around himself, in addition to violence, was "charlatanry," as he apparently put it. This strikes me as about as great a revelation as the fact that the Pope is Catholic. American society is totally opportunistic, epitomized by TV shows such as "Survivor." As Karl Marx put it long ago, the bonds of friendship and community get dissolved in "the icy waters of egotistical calculation." It's all Los Angeles, in the United States: everybody has an agenda, an ulterior motive, which is the core of their individual program of self-promotion, and which they regard as the purpose of life. Someone coming from a society that still, in some ways, has traditional values, can't help but be disgusted at what passes for human relations in the US. As the historian and social critic Paul Fussell once wrote, "everything in the United States is coated with a fine layer of fraud."
3. Of course, there are literally millions of immigrants who come to the United States, absorb the violent messages that exist all around them, see the charlatanry that pervades the American Way of Life, and don't go on a killing rampage. In that sense, individual psychology might indeed be more helpful than mass sociology, but only if your goal is to answer the question, Why this particular individual? But there is, surely, a deeper question, namely: Why aren't a lot more individuals doing something similar? The huge intake of Prozac and other tranquilizers might offer one possible answer, of course, in that these drugs enable the American population to suppress its rage. But the society that generates the rage remains the crucial, and unacknowledged, point. And this is the truth that CNN seeks (consciously or unconsciously) to keep out of the public eye. As a result, the "understanding" it provides is self-serving and skin-deep. How many other societies, Japan excepted (which is a whole other discussion), are plagued by chronic outbursts of seemingly apolitical violence against innocent bystanders? The fact is that these outbursts are political, if "political" is expanded to include the nature of the culture at large, and the way in which it works at its most basic level.
One final example of what I am talking about. During the vapid CNN interview with Cho's former roommates about his sex life, a caption ran at the bottom of the TV screen, telling the viewers that this interview was available only on CNN. And there we have it, in a nutshell: the goal of every American institution is (or supposedly should be) to be Numero Uno. In the midst of a massacre, of the brutal deaths of 32 innocents (including Professor Livriu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who apparently had to come to an American college campus to finally get himself liquidated), what's important to CNN is that they be first with the scoop. Death makes absolutely no difference to these people; that the charlatanry continue, is what counts for them. Everything is marketing in the United States, everything is promotion, and I submit that this is what managed to push Cho over the edge. That CNN couldn't even see the irony of what they were doing, finally says it all.
I was traveling through Tabasco and Chiapas (Mexico) during the time, so my only access to information, besides the local newspapers, was CNN. In a weird way, the CNN coverage was as peculiar as the event itself. The focus was entirely on who this person, Cho Seung-Hui, was; the larger context in which the event took place–and there have been quite a few in recent US history–was never even referred to. Of course, if you focus on how aberrant Cho was, then the larger context becomes (supposedly) irrelevant and can be ignored; which is certainly what the media, and the American public, want. So we learned that Cho was Korean, not American; a loner, depressed from an early age; a psychotic, obsessed with death and weaponry (as one sensationalist video, which CNN kept playing over and over, revealed), and so on. CNN also conducted a fatuous interview with Cho's former roommates, trying to probe into his relations with women and his sexual proclivities. Other coverage included the usual handwringing after such incidents, suggestions from some journalists and "experts" that students and professors need to come to classes armed; the appointing of a commission to investigate the event, etc.–the usual suspects, in short, which never amounted to anything in the past and won't this time around either.
CNN did, however, briefly refer to some sort of suicide note left by Cho, in which he apparently talked about the pretensions of the wealthy students at the school, and the "charlatanry" that pervaded the campus. The news network also read an email from someone in Korea, who pointed out that Cho was, green card notwithstanding, an American: he had come to the US with his parents when he was 8 years old, and had thus spent two-thirds of his life in an American context, being exposed to American values. "An incident such as this [massacre]," the writer concluded, "has not occurred in Korea during its 5000-year-long history." This too was passed over by CNN, a topic they obviously preferred not to deal with.
Of course, I never personally saw Cho's suicide note, so I can only guess at what went on in his mind, or what led him to kill 32 innocent people. But the brief reference to the contents of the note, the letter from the Korean writer, and the endless focus on Cho himself as alienated and insane, suggest a few things that were not part of the CNN coverage. To take an extreme analogy, there would seem to be an odd similarity between this coverage and that of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Network news "analysis," if such it can be called, was all about Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta as "evil" and "insane." When Susan Sontag subsequently made a brief comment in the pages of the New Yorker to the effect that US foreign policy might tell us more about the causes of 9/11 than the psyche of Osama bin Laden, a national uproar ensued, in which she was basically branded a traitor. Any serious student of US postwar activity in the Middle East knows that Sontag's comment was totally on target; but the desire of the media, and the American public, to preserve an image of American innocence vs. external evil is too powerful to allow even a hint of an alternative possibility. In the case of the Virginia Tech massacre, I am not (as in the case of 9/11) suggesting that the slaughter of civilians is justified; of course it isn't. But as in the case of Susan Sontag's commentary, I do think that what happened at Virginia Tech might be explicable, and that a deeper understanding of the event beyond "the killer was insane" might be worth having. Consider, then, the following:
1. Cho Seung-Hui, at age 8, left a society that has not had such a civilian incident in its 5000-year history and entered a society in which violence, via movies, television, and basic daily life, is the norm. This was his true socialization as a child, adolescent, and young adult. Just to take one statistical example, a US-Canada survey taken in the year 2000 revealed that while 12% of Canadians said Yes to the question, "Is it acceptable to use violence to get what you want?", 24% of Americans answered in the affirmative. Or if we consider the world data on homicide, the average rate of homicides per 100,000 people in the European Union was 1.7 during 1997-99, while the US rate during the same period was 6.26, or nearly 4 times that number. The homicide rate for American children during that period was 5 times higher than for the children of the next 25 wealthiest nations in the world combined.
2. What Cho also saw around himself, in addition to violence, was "charlatanry," as he apparently put it. This strikes me as about as great a revelation as the fact that the Pope is Catholic. American society is totally opportunistic, epitomized by TV shows such as "Survivor." As Karl Marx put it long ago, the bonds of friendship and community get dissolved in "the icy waters of egotistical calculation." It's all Los Angeles, in the United States: everybody has an agenda, an ulterior motive, which is the core of their individual program of self-promotion, and which they regard as the purpose of life. Someone coming from a society that still, in some ways, has traditional values, can't help but be disgusted at what passes for human relations in the US. As the historian and social critic Paul Fussell once wrote, "everything in the United States is coated with a fine layer of fraud."
3. Of course, there are literally millions of immigrants who come to the United States, absorb the violent messages that exist all around them, see the charlatanry that pervades the American Way of Life, and don't go on a killing rampage. In that sense, individual psychology might indeed be more helpful than mass sociology, but only if your goal is to answer the question, Why this particular individual? But there is, surely, a deeper question, namely: Why aren't a lot more individuals doing something similar? The huge intake of Prozac and other tranquilizers might offer one possible answer, of course, in that these drugs enable the American population to suppress its rage. But the society that generates the rage remains the crucial, and unacknowledged, point. And this is the truth that CNN seeks (consciously or unconsciously) to keep out of the public eye. As a result, the "understanding" it provides is self-serving and skin-deep. How many other societies, Japan excepted (which is a whole other discussion), are plagued by chronic outbursts of seemingly apolitical violence against innocent bystanders? The fact is that these outbursts are political, if "political" is expanded to include the nature of the culture at large, and the way in which it works at its most basic level.
One final example of what I am talking about. During the vapid CNN interview with Cho's former roommates about his sex life, a caption ran at the bottom of the TV screen, telling the viewers that this interview was available only on CNN. And there we have it, in a nutshell: the goal of every American institution is (or supposedly should be) to be Numero Uno. In the midst of a massacre, of the brutal deaths of 32 innocents (including Professor Livriu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who apparently had to come to an American college campus to finally get himself liquidated), what's important to CNN is that they be first with the scoop. Death makes absolutely no difference to these people; that the charlatanry continue, is what counts for them. Everything is marketing in the United States, everything is promotion, and I submit that this is what managed to push Cho over the edge. That CNN couldn't even see the irony of what they were doing, finally says it all.
April 06, 2007
Review of DAA in The Texas Observer, 3/9/07
Still Declining and Falling
by Paul Christensen
Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
By Morris Berman
W.W. Norton, $25.95
Morris Berman is a messenger bringing bad news about the coming end of the American empire, which he estimates will occur around the year 2040. We are heading over the cliff because of uncontrolled trade deficits, a “negative identity” that feeds on war against weak nations, a fatuous culture of TV and empty movies, failed schools and pain-free universities, our shopping mania, a captive press, lost civil rights, lobbies that run Congress, and a Justice Department that freely rewrites Constitutional law. And we are a doomed society mainly because the public itself is no longer active or aware, and keeps re-electing the very people undermining its remaining freedoms.
“America takes away love and gives its citizens gadgets, in return, which most of them regard as a terrific bargain,” Berman writes. The “sacred cow” in the United States is the American people: “Anything has the force of biblical revelation if it is ascribed to this mystical, all-knowing entity.” Berman prefers Nicholas von Hoffman’s assessment of that same populace as “asses, dolts, and blockheads,” or as “bobbleheads in bubbleland.”
And the critics and some bloggers want to kill the messenger. Writing her review of Dark Ages for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, the Iron Lady of review columns, could hardly contain her rage over Berman’s calling America names. “He is smugly fatalistic and sweepingly dismissive of political debate,” she writes, calling him “indiscriminate and intemperate” and opening her review with a salvo: “This is a book that gives the Left a bad name.”
There is a deep intolerance for even the best writers of Berman’s tradition. When Walt Whitman wrote Democratic Vistas three years after the Civil War, he concluded that the nation had learned nothing from the war’s massacres; instead, he wrote, the peace that followed was a time of anarchy and greed. His words were not welcome. He predicted the coming of the Gilded Age, and suspected the war may have been fought for reasons other than the liberation of slaves—namely, to construct a national economy with the corporations that Berman tells us in his book Twilight of American Culture and now, six years later in Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, are killing democracy and ending civilization as we knew it.
Behind Berman is a host of American prophets of gloom like Thorstein Veblen, coiner of the phrase “conspicuous consumption”; Theodore Dreiser, who once noted (in his 1916 memoir A Hoosier Holiday) that any American given the choice between two houses will always choose the uglier of the two; Mark Twain, of course; Frank Lloyd Wright, who, asked about the state of American architecture, suggested tilting the country up on its California edge and sweeping all the buildings into the Atlantic. Sinclair Lewis is on the list with his notion of Babbitt as the quintessential, gadget-loving bourgeois; and H.L. Mencken, who gave us the immortal names for the middle class, the “booboisie,” and “the Bible belt” for southern Christians. The list is long and populous, with cranks and voices crying in the wilderness. One can add the literally hundreds of disillusioned historians, sociologists, philosophers, and writers whose work is liberally cited throughout Berman’s latest diatribe. He is not alone in saying we are rushing to our own destruction.
Over Berman’s shoulder is Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West (1918), and before him, the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an attack on organized religion and an ironic commentary on Roman hubris and its consequences as England was launching her own empire. Decline is a frequent reference in Berman’s arguments. This is thinking with the “big picture,” and it should come as no surprise that Berman earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, home of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s “History of Ideas” program, in which cultural movements are charted from dark and obscure origins dating as far back the 6th century. No one remotely touched by Lovejoy can think in terms of decades or world wars.
Dark Ages covers the full-scale anatomy of how America went wrong. Berman reaches back to the land-grabbing and stony individualism of the colonial period, citing religious sources and observing how Puritan ledgers were headed “in the name of God and profit” each day. Towns from their inception were mere transit points for people looking to make money, not community. Borders were porous, and the deep urge of the first Americans was to move up, buy real estate as a commodity, and when the economy failed, move west. This left the country in tatters under a veil of supposed coherence and patriotism.
Berman argues that all across the history of the country, empty slogans and false promises covered over the anarchic mayhem and violence of a people jostling for personal advantage and little else. Once corporations absorbed all this energy under the collective powers of huge legal entities, the force of runaway capitalism grew ominous and began to erode the powers of government to rule or control the marketplace. All values devolved into market values; nothing possessed inherent meaning.
If the Great Depression slowed things down for a while, with federal restraints on the stock exchanges and big business, the lesson didn’t last very long. Berman argues that our downfall really occurred when Richard Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods Agreement (limiting the fluctuation of foreign currencies, with the dollar pegged to the value of gold) in 1971. Oceans of capital began to wash into America’s banks, with the immediate consequence of investors pulling back money from American manufacturers, to avoid the expenses of taxes, pensions, and medical bills, and turning instead to plunder Third World countries for cheap human labor. In turn, that pulled the plug on most cities, which saw their tax bases shrink as unemployment, crime, and vagrancy soared.
But the disintegration began earlier. To soak up loneliness, the car was invented at precisely the moment in which cities were losing their shape and meaning. Americans took to the road, and soon radio filled the evenings in lieu of friendly chats with neighbors. The television peddled corporate wares to an overworked, jaded public no longer interested in plays, symphonies, or music played in local parks. Isolation and boredom became the constants of American life, with work taking up most of the week. The result was alienation from all forms of civic participation, and a corresponding numbness toward changing the situation.
According to Berman, presidents Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bushes senior and junior, and Clinton are all villains of modern political history, the undertakers of American society as they rig small wars to keep us distracted. The one exception is Jimmy Carter, a modest redeemer, who emerges as a sort of hero who tried to slow down corporate and military expansion, and to hold back the forces that would usurp government in the name of free enterprise. After that, le déluge. The worst of times has come with the election and re-election of George W. Bush. Berman reserves his real fire until this moment. He describes Bush as a “dry drunk,” a “man-boy unable to empathize,” and a Christian fundamentalist sadist.
The closing chapters of this dark book argue there is no way to turn back the doomsday clock on America; forces are too well aligned to stop the final disintegration and collapse of the nation. “A world awash in suburbs and shopping malls, television and sensationalism, cell phones and Burger King, Prozac and violence, fundamentalist Christianity and sink-or-swim ethics, is no vision for the future.” Of course, Berman was writing this book in the grim aftermath of the Bush re-election, when Republicans held both houses of Congress. It looked darker than it does today, with Democrats back in power and already making changes in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s first “100 Hours.” Who knows, it could get a little better before Berman’s doomsday clock tolls midnight?
The danger of writing a book on the political moment, regardless of how wide the historical canvas, is that when things do change, contradictions ensue. The midterm elections demonstrated that the American people are rethinking their faith in Bush and the Republicans. The cost of global warming may yet require us to be more realistic and join the rest of the world in holding back our hydrocarbon emissions. But modest signs don’t persuade me to think that we can muddle through much longer. China, India and the European Union are all poised to replace us as world powers by the midcentury; this much seems certain from what Berman and others are saying. While civilization itself may not crumble, the American empire seems doomed, something Berman suggests may not be such a bad thing.
The real importance of this book may not be in its predictions of America’s coming fall; we are already used to thinking our time on center stage is growing short. Too many mistakes, too many miscalculations, too much money spent on the military and security, not enough on our infrastructure. We understand that. What Berman achieves is a portrait of America as a collection of unassimilated immigrants unable to form a society because greed, an erroneous cult of individualism at any cost, and an indifference to our natural resources have made coherent life impossible. Our cities are half-dead, our mass transport is in ruins, and our lives are fragmented and dysfunctional. For the first time in our history, more women live alone than with partners, a sad commentary on social life. More children are on Prozac, some from early infancy, than in any other society. Work is meaningless and all-consuming for the average American, leaving no time for leisure or socializing. Berman brings all this together in compelling prose buttressed by massive reading and statistical authority.
Even if there is some truth in what some reviewers have been saying about Dark Ages, that it is held together with thin thread, too many quotes, too much dependence on hearsay and his own anecdotal evidence, the fact is, Berman is right. We are an unhappy, discordant, lonely nation glutted on bad food and junk from the malls; we are depressed and hide it behind drugs and prescription medicines. We live empty lives but confuse them with longings for bigger and better houses, more cars, more TV channels, more of everything but the modest solution of changing our fundamental orientation to life and turning back to community as our salvation. Berman wins this argument hands down. To object to his methods or his so-called intemperance plays into his hands—he says we are easily gulled by bromides and false promises, and hide from the reality that we are a decaying nation. What any reader should do after reading Dark Ages America is weep, and then ask how to protect oneself and lend a hand to a neighbor.
Paul Christensen is a poet and essayist who teaches modern literature and creative writing at Texas A&M. His new book, Strangers in Paradise: A Memoir of Provence, is due out in April from Wings Press of San Antonio.
by Paul Christensen
Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
By Morris Berman
W.W. Norton, $25.95
Morris Berman is a messenger bringing bad news about the coming end of the American empire, which he estimates will occur around the year 2040. We are heading over the cliff because of uncontrolled trade deficits, a “negative identity” that feeds on war against weak nations, a fatuous culture of TV and empty movies, failed schools and pain-free universities, our shopping mania, a captive press, lost civil rights, lobbies that run Congress, and a Justice Department that freely rewrites Constitutional law. And we are a doomed society mainly because the public itself is no longer active or aware, and keeps re-electing the very people undermining its remaining freedoms.
“America takes away love and gives its citizens gadgets, in return, which most of them regard as a terrific bargain,” Berman writes. The “sacred cow” in the United States is the American people: “Anything has the force of biblical revelation if it is ascribed to this mystical, all-knowing entity.” Berman prefers Nicholas von Hoffman’s assessment of that same populace as “asses, dolts, and blockheads,” or as “bobbleheads in bubbleland.”
And the critics and some bloggers want to kill the messenger. Writing her review of Dark Ages for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, the Iron Lady of review columns, could hardly contain her rage over Berman’s calling America names. “He is smugly fatalistic and sweepingly dismissive of political debate,” she writes, calling him “indiscriminate and intemperate” and opening her review with a salvo: “This is a book that gives the Left a bad name.”
There is a deep intolerance for even the best writers of Berman’s tradition. When Walt Whitman wrote Democratic Vistas three years after the Civil War, he concluded that the nation had learned nothing from the war’s massacres; instead, he wrote, the peace that followed was a time of anarchy and greed. His words were not welcome. He predicted the coming of the Gilded Age, and suspected the war may have been fought for reasons other than the liberation of slaves—namely, to construct a national economy with the corporations that Berman tells us in his book Twilight of American Culture and now, six years later in Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, are killing democracy and ending civilization as we knew it.
Behind Berman is a host of American prophets of gloom like Thorstein Veblen, coiner of the phrase “conspicuous consumption”; Theodore Dreiser, who once noted (in his 1916 memoir A Hoosier Holiday) that any American given the choice between two houses will always choose the uglier of the two; Mark Twain, of course; Frank Lloyd Wright, who, asked about the state of American architecture, suggested tilting the country up on its California edge and sweeping all the buildings into the Atlantic. Sinclair Lewis is on the list with his notion of Babbitt as the quintessential, gadget-loving bourgeois; and H.L. Mencken, who gave us the immortal names for the middle class, the “booboisie,” and “the Bible belt” for southern Christians. The list is long and populous, with cranks and voices crying in the wilderness. One can add the literally hundreds of disillusioned historians, sociologists, philosophers, and writers whose work is liberally cited throughout Berman’s latest diatribe. He is not alone in saying we are rushing to our own destruction.
Over Berman’s shoulder is Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West (1918), and before him, the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an attack on organized religion and an ironic commentary on Roman hubris and its consequences as England was launching her own empire. Decline is a frequent reference in Berman’s arguments. This is thinking with the “big picture,” and it should come as no surprise that Berman earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, home of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s “History of Ideas” program, in which cultural movements are charted from dark and obscure origins dating as far back the 6th century. No one remotely touched by Lovejoy can think in terms of decades or world wars.
Dark Ages covers the full-scale anatomy of how America went wrong. Berman reaches back to the land-grabbing and stony individualism of the colonial period, citing religious sources and observing how Puritan ledgers were headed “in the name of God and profit” each day. Towns from their inception were mere transit points for people looking to make money, not community. Borders were porous, and the deep urge of the first Americans was to move up, buy real estate as a commodity, and when the economy failed, move west. This left the country in tatters under a veil of supposed coherence and patriotism.
Berman argues that all across the history of the country, empty slogans and false promises covered over the anarchic mayhem and violence of a people jostling for personal advantage and little else. Once corporations absorbed all this energy under the collective powers of huge legal entities, the force of runaway capitalism grew ominous and began to erode the powers of government to rule or control the marketplace. All values devolved into market values; nothing possessed inherent meaning.
If the Great Depression slowed things down for a while, with federal restraints on the stock exchanges and big business, the lesson didn’t last very long. Berman argues that our downfall really occurred when Richard Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods Agreement (limiting the fluctuation of foreign currencies, with the dollar pegged to the value of gold) in 1971. Oceans of capital began to wash into America’s banks, with the immediate consequence of investors pulling back money from American manufacturers, to avoid the expenses of taxes, pensions, and medical bills, and turning instead to plunder Third World countries for cheap human labor. In turn, that pulled the plug on most cities, which saw their tax bases shrink as unemployment, crime, and vagrancy soared.
But the disintegration began earlier. To soak up loneliness, the car was invented at precisely the moment in which cities were losing their shape and meaning. Americans took to the road, and soon radio filled the evenings in lieu of friendly chats with neighbors. The television peddled corporate wares to an overworked, jaded public no longer interested in plays, symphonies, or music played in local parks. Isolation and boredom became the constants of American life, with work taking up most of the week. The result was alienation from all forms of civic participation, and a corresponding numbness toward changing the situation.
According to Berman, presidents Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bushes senior and junior, and Clinton are all villains of modern political history, the undertakers of American society as they rig small wars to keep us distracted. The one exception is Jimmy Carter, a modest redeemer, who emerges as a sort of hero who tried to slow down corporate and military expansion, and to hold back the forces that would usurp government in the name of free enterprise. After that, le déluge. The worst of times has come with the election and re-election of George W. Bush. Berman reserves his real fire until this moment. He describes Bush as a “dry drunk,” a “man-boy unable to empathize,” and a Christian fundamentalist sadist.
The closing chapters of this dark book argue there is no way to turn back the doomsday clock on America; forces are too well aligned to stop the final disintegration and collapse of the nation. “A world awash in suburbs and shopping malls, television and sensationalism, cell phones and Burger King, Prozac and violence, fundamentalist Christianity and sink-or-swim ethics, is no vision for the future.” Of course, Berman was writing this book in the grim aftermath of the Bush re-election, when Republicans held both houses of Congress. It looked darker than it does today, with Democrats back in power and already making changes in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s first “100 Hours.” Who knows, it could get a little better before Berman’s doomsday clock tolls midnight?
The danger of writing a book on the political moment, regardless of how wide the historical canvas, is that when things do change, contradictions ensue. The midterm elections demonstrated that the American people are rethinking their faith in Bush and the Republicans. The cost of global warming may yet require us to be more realistic and join the rest of the world in holding back our hydrocarbon emissions. But modest signs don’t persuade me to think that we can muddle through much longer. China, India and the European Union are all poised to replace us as world powers by the midcentury; this much seems certain from what Berman and others are saying. While civilization itself may not crumble, the American empire seems doomed, something Berman suggests may not be such a bad thing.
The real importance of this book may not be in its predictions of America’s coming fall; we are already used to thinking our time on center stage is growing short. Too many mistakes, too many miscalculations, too much money spent on the military and security, not enough on our infrastructure. We understand that. What Berman achieves is a portrait of America as a collection of unassimilated immigrants unable to form a society because greed, an erroneous cult of individualism at any cost, and an indifference to our natural resources have made coherent life impossible. Our cities are half-dead, our mass transport is in ruins, and our lives are fragmented and dysfunctional. For the first time in our history, more women live alone than with partners, a sad commentary on social life. More children are on Prozac, some from early infancy, than in any other society. Work is meaningless and all-consuming for the average American, leaving no time for leisure or socializing. Berman brings all this together in compelling prose buttressed by massive reading and statistical authority.
Even if there is some truth in what some reviewers have been saying about Dark Ages, that it is held together with thin thread, too many quotes, too much dependence on hearsay and his own anecdotal evidence, the fact is, Berman is right. We are an unhappy, discordant, lonely nation glutted on bad food and junk from the malls; we are depressed and hide it behind drugs and prescription medicines. We live empty lives but confuse them with longings for bigger and better houses, more cars, more TV channels, more of everything but the modest solution of changing our fundamental orientation to life and turning back to community as our salvation. Berman wins this argument hands down. To object to his methods or his so-called intemperance plays into his hands—he says we are easily gulled by bromides and false promises, and hide from the reality that we are a decaying nation. What any reader should do after reading Dark Ages America is weep, and then ask how to protect oneself and lend a hand to a neighbor.
Paul Christensen is a poet and essayist who teaches modern literature and creative writing at Texas A&M. His new book, Strangers in Paradise: A Memoir of Provence, is due out in April from Wings Press of San Antonio.
March 08, 2007
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