Rest assured, it can only get worse:
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/106551
November 16, 2008
November 13, 2008
conspiracy vs. Conspiracy in American History
The notion that the parliamentary democracy of the industrial nations is a sham, and that the real power lies not in the hands of the people (or their elected representatives) but in the hands of a small, ruling elite is a view most closely associated with Karl Marx. This is one meaning of the word “conspiracy”: the ruling class knows what its interests are, and it acts to protect them. In this sense of the term, conspiracy is equivalent to elite theory, because the implication is that the ruling class acts with a unified consciousness. Indeed, Marx argued that the emergence of conflicts within the ranks of the elite was a sign that the system was ripe for revolutionary overthrow.
Elite theory, then, holds that the people (or masses) are under the illusion that through their vote they control the direction of the ship of state, whereas the real captains of the ship–the captains of industry, the eminences grises–are not themselves on the ballot. The public does not get to vote for them, but rather for their paid representatives. Thus the post-election euphoria in the United States over Barack Obama is nothing more than a bubble, an illusion, because the lion’s share of the $750 million he collected in campaign contributions (according to the Australian journalist John Pilger) came from Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. These corporations, it hardly need be said, do not have the welfare of the American people as their top priority; and it is also the case that having invested in a president, they expect a return on their investment once he takes office. And if history is any guide here, they are going to get it. It is for this reason that what we have in the United States, according to Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel, is a “procedural democracy”: the form, the appearance, is democratic, but the actual content, the result, is not. As the eminent sociologist C. Wright Mills put it in 1956,
“In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the
political order, that clue is the decline of politics as genuine and
public debate of alternative decisions....America is now in considerable
part more a formal political democracy than a democratic social
structure, and even the formal political mechanics are weak.”
While it is undoubtedly true that elites occasionally act in a deliberate and concerted way, it was Mills in particular who pointed out that the reality was significantly more nuanced than this. For the most part, it is not that the rich or super-rich get together in some corporate boardroom and ask themselves, “Now how can we best screw the workers and the middle class?” No, said Mills, what in fact happens is that they socialize together, in an informal sort of way, and recognize their class affiliations:
“Members of the several higher circles know one another as personal
friends and even as neighbors; they mingle with one another on the
golf course, in the gentlemen’s clubs, at resorts, on transcontinental
airplanes, and on ocean liners. They meet at the estates of mutual
friends, face each other in front of the TV camera, or serve on the same
philanthropic committee; and many are sure to cross one another’s path
in the columns of newspapers, if not in the exact cafés from which many
of these columns originate....The conception of the power elite,
accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history
since the origins of World War II must be understood as a secret plot,
or as a great and co-ordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite.
The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds.”
We are not, in short, talking about some sort of organized brotherhood, some quasi-Masonic financial clique, as it were. However–and this is the crucial point–in terms of concrete outcome, we might as well be. Mills goes on:
“But, once the conjunction of structural trends and of the personal will
to utilize it gave rise to the power elite, then plans and programs did
occur to its members and indeed it is not possible to interpret many
events and official policies...without reference to the power elite.”
Mills’ work falls more into the category of social criticism than of social science per se; he was not big on facts and figures. But in the fifty-plus years since he wrote the above words, his profile of American democracy as illusory has been fleshed out by numerous sociologists and political scientists armed with reams of data. The most recent work in this genre, Superclass, by David Rothkopf, identifies a global elite of roughly 6,000 individuals who are running the show, worldwide, and the top fifty financial institutions that control nearly $50 trillion in assets. Plot or no plot, the results are the same.
This, then, is elite theory, or what I call conspiracy with a small “c”. And it is a real fact of political life, no question about it. But what may be even more significant than this are what I call Conspiracies with a capital “C”, by which I mean the unconscious mythologies, or isms, that govern American life. This was the thing that Marx, and Mills, both missed (though the Italian sociologist Antonio Gramsci did come close to it with his notion of “hegemony,” or the symbolic control of society): the elites aren’t doing anything that the masses don’t already agree with; which is why, certainly, in the United States, socialism never really had a chance. When Henry Wriston, who was president of the Council on Foreign Relations during 1951-64, wrote that U.S. foreign policy “is the expression of the will of the people,” he knew what he was talking about. As many observers (even American ones) have pointed out, what the American people–less than 5% of the world’s population–want is an indulgent and wasteful lifestyle, in which they consume 25% of the world’s energy. Thus in the presidential debates of October 2008, Barack Obama referred to the 25% figure, and then talked about ways of ensuring that that rate of consumption continue unchecked. He did not, as did Jimmy Carter more than thirty years ago, argue that growth was not necessarily a positive thing, that Americans needed to burn less energy, and that the American military–the guarantor of that profligate lifestyle–had to be scaled down accordingly. Indeed, within two years of taking office, Mr. Carter was popularly regarded as something of a joke, and by 1980 Ronald Reagan, who told the American people they could have it all, was elected by a landslide. (Significantly, the first thing he did upon moving into the White House was to have the solar panels that Mr. Carter had installed on the roof removed.) So while it is true that elites run the show, they nevertheless govern with the (misguided) consent of the people. As the nineteenth-century Sioux holy man, Chief Sitting Bull, was supposed to have said, “possessions are a disease with them.” But his was hardly the majority view–not then, not now.
What, then, are the major Conspiracies, or isms, of American life? I think we can identify four, in particular.
1. The notion of Americans as the “chosen people,” and of the nation as a “city on a hill.” This latter phrase–quoted by both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential campaign–goes back to the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, as he was sailing from England to America on the Arabella in 1630:
“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us....He shall
make us a praise and glory....For we must Consider that we
shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
The idea is that it would be America’s unique mission to bring democracy to all the peoples of the earth, inasmuch as the American way of life was (obviously) the best. (Iraq is merely the latest manifestation of this way of thinking.) In fact, the Puritans took the Jews of the Old Testament as their model, in which the exodus from Egypt, and invasion of Canaan, was regarded as the paradigm for the establishment of the Colonies. Cotton Mather even referred to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “our American Jerusalem.” The notion that the story of the United States is the primary manifestation of God’s will on earth has an enormous hold on the American psyche. “American exceptionalism,” Alexis de Tocqueville called it; it is with us to this day.
2. Along with this we have Ism No. 2: the existence, in the United States, of a “civil religion.” This was first pointed out by the sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967, the fact that despite the presence of Catholicism, Judaism, and numerous Protestant sects in America, the real religion of the American people was America itself. To be an American is regarded (unconsciously, by Americans) as an ideological/religious commitment, not an accident of birth. This is why critics of the US are immediately labeled “un-American,” and are practically regarded as traitors. (Quite ridiculous, when you think about it: can you imagine a Swedish critic of Sweden, for example, being attacked as “un-Swedish”?) The historian Sidney Mead pegged it correctly when he called America “the nation with the soul of a church,” while another historian, Richard Hofstadter, declared that “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.” As Graham Greene portrayed it in The Quiet American, this is not a position that encourages self-reflection.
3. The third unconscious mythology is the one identified by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893: the existence of a supposedly endless frontier, into which the American people would expand geographically. Eventually, it became an economic frontier, and finally an imperial one–Manifest Destiny gone global. This lay at the heart of the Carter-Reagan debate, for the notion of limits to growth is almost a form of heresy in an American context. The American Dream envisions a world without limits, in which the goal, as the gangster (played by Edward G. Robinson) tells Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, is simply “more”. De Tocqueville had already, in the 1830s, commented on the great “restlessness” of the American people; and more than a century later, the British journalist Alistair Cooke remarked that what were regarded as luxuries throughout most of the world, were regarded as necessities in the United States. If Americans never had much of an interest in socialism, they probably had even less interest in buddhism, the occasional Zen center notwithstanding. It was not for nothing that the historian William Leach entitled his study of late-nineteenth-century American expansionism, Land of Desire.
4. Finally, we have a national character based on extreme individualism–Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” As the historian Joyce Appleby describes it, this originated in the shift in the definition of the word “virtue” that took place in the Colonies in the 1790s. Previous to that time, the word had a European (or even classical) definition, namely “the capacity of some men to rise above private interests and devote themselves to the public good.” By 1800, the definition had undergone a complete inversion: “virtue” now meant the capacity to look out for oneself in an opportunistic environment. Whereas the former definition was adhered to by the Federalists, the Jeffersonian Republicans actively promoted the latter definition, as part of the new nation’s break with England and all things European. Life was not to be about service to the community, but rather about competition and acquisition of goods. This is summarized in the popular American expression, “There is no free lunch.” The “self-made man” is expected to make it on his own.
There have been very few dissenters to this fourth ism; in many ways, American history can be seen as the story of a nation consistently choosing individual solutions over collective ones. One American who did dissent, however, was Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions he wrote: “The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin.”
And “ruin” is the operative word here. While there is certainly an upside to these four isms–the sunny side of technological innovation and the Yankee “can-do” mentality, for example–in the long run these unconscious mythologies, in dialectical fashion, began to turn against those caught up in their magic spell. It surely cannot be an accident that 25% of all the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in American jails (1% of the entire US adult population); that two-thirds of the world’s consumption of antidepressants occurs in the United States; that 24% of the American population say that it’s OK to use violence in the pursuit of one’s goals, 44% support the torture of alleged or suspected terrorists, and 39% want Muslims in the US to be required to carry a religious ID on them at all times (why not just make it a yellow star, and be done with it?); that the country has the greatest percentage of single-person dwellings in the world, the highest homicide rate, the largest military budget (by several orders of magnitude), and the greatest number of square feet of shopping malls on the surface of the planet. The data on ignorance, which I have documented elsewhere, are breathtaking, and Robert Putnam’s description (in Bowling Alone) of the collapse of community, trust, and friendship is one of the saddest things I have ever read. Dialectically, and ironically, American “success” became American ruin; the crash of October 2008 was merely the tip of the iceberg.
The power of isms, certainly in the American case, derives from the fact that they are unconscious, embedded deep in the psyche. They constitute Conspiracies in that those who hold them are like marionettes on strings, screaming “Obama!” (for example) without realizing that the new president can no more buck the elites running the country than he can dismantle the mythologies that drive its citizens–himself included. As for the individual, so for the nation: the only hope is to see ourselves as we are seen, from the outside, as it were. And therein lies the paradox. For the four Conspiracies close in on themselves, forming a kind of mirror-lined glass sphere that does not permit any dissonant information to enter. Sandel, Mills, Rothkopf, Bellah, Mead, Leach, Appleby, Putnam–America’s finest, really–will never become household words, and if they did, it would probably be as objects of contempt. For this is finally the most terrifying thing about isms or Conspiracies: we do not choose them; rather, it is they that choose us.
©Morris Berman, 2008
Elite theory, then, holds that the people (or masses) are under the illusion that through their vote they control the direction of the ship of state, whereas the real captains of the ship–the captains of industry, the eminences grises–are not themselves on the ballot. The public does not get to vote for them, but rather for their paid representatives. Thus the post-election euphoria in the United States over Barack Obama is nothing more than a bubble, an illusion, because the lion’s share of the $750 million he collected in campaign contributions (according to the Australian journalist John Pilger) came from Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. These corporations, it hardly need be said, do not have the welfare of the American people as their top priority; and it is also the case that having invested in a president, they expect a return on their investment once he takes office. And if history is any guide here, they are going to get it. It is for this reason that what we have in the United States, according to Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel, is a “procedural democracy”: the form, the appearance, is democratic, but the actual content, the result, is not. As the eminent sociologist C. Wright Mills put it in 1956,
“In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the
political order, that clue is the decline of politics as genuine and
public debate of alternative decisions....America is now in considerable
part more a formal political democracy than a democratic social
structure, and even the formal political mechanics are weak.”
While it is undoubtedly true that elites occasionally act in a deliberate and concerted way, it was Mills in particular who pointed out that the reality was significantly more nuanced than this. For the most part, it is not that the rich or super-rich get together in some corporate boardroom and ask themselves, “Now how can we best screw the workers and the middle class?” No, said Mills, what in fact happens is that they socialize together, in an informal sort of way, and recognize their class affiliations:
“Members of the several higher circles know one another as personal
friends and even as neighbors; they mingle with one another on the
golf course, in the gentlemen’s clubs, at resorts, on transcontinental
airplanes, and on ocean liners. They meet at the estates of mutual
friends, face each other in front of the TV camera, or serve on the same
philanthropic committee; and many are sure to cross one another’s path
in the columns of newspapers, if not in the exact cafés from which many
of these columns originate....The conception of the power elite,
accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history
since the origins of World War II must be understood as a secret plot,
or as a great and co-ordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite.
The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds.”
We are not, in short, talking about some sort of organized brotherhood, some quasi-Masonic financial clique, as it were. However–and this is the crucial point–in terms of concrete outcome, we might as well be. Mills goes on:
“But, once the conjunction of structural trends and of the personal will
to utilize it gave rise to the power elite, then plans and programs did
occur to its members and indeed it is not possible to interpret many
events and official policies...without reference to the power elite.”
Mills’ work falls more into the category of social criticism than of social science per se; he was not big on facts and figures. But in the fifty-plus years since he wrote the above words, his profile of American democracy as illusory has been fleshed out by numerous sociologists and political scientists armed with reams of data. The most recent work in this genre, Superclass, by David Rothkopf, identifies a global elite of roughly 6,000 individuals who are running the show, worldwide, and the top fifty financial institutions that control nearly $50 trillion in assets. Plot or no plot, the results are the same.
This, then, is elite theory, or what I call conspiracy with a small “c”. And it is a real fact of political life, no question about it. But what may be even more significant than this are what I call Conspiracies with a capital “C”, by which I mean the unconscious mythologies, or isms, that govern American life. This was the thing that Marx, and Mills, both missed (though the Italian sociologist Antonio Gramsci did come close to it with his notion of “hegemony,” or the symbolic control of society): the elites aren’t doing anything that the masses don’t already agree with; which is why, certainly, in the United States, socialism never really had a chance. When Henry Wriston, who was president of the Council on Foreign Relations during 1951-64, wrote that U.S. foreign policy “is the expression of the will of the people,” he knew what he was talking about. As many observers (even American ones) have pointed out, what the American people–less than 5% of the world’s population–want is an indulgent and wasteful lifestyle, in which they consume 25% of the world’s energy. Thus in the presidential debates of October 2008, Barack Obama referred to the 25% figure, and then talked about ways of ensuring that that rate of consumption continue unchecked. He did not, as did Jimmy Carter more than thirty years ago, argue that growth was not necessarily a positive thing, that Americans needed to burn less energy, and that the American military–the guarantor of that profligate lifestyle–had to be scaled down accordingly. Indeed, within two years of taking office, Mr. Carter was popularly regarded as something of a joke, and by 1980 Ronald Reagan, who told the American people they could have it all, was elected by a landslide. (Significantly, the first thing he did upon moving into the White House was to have the solar panels that Mr. Carter had installed on the roof removed.) So while it is true that elites run the show, they nevertheless govern with the (misguided) consent of the people. As the nineteenth-century Sioux holy man, Chief Sitting Bull, was supposed to have said, “possessions are a disease with them.” But his was hardly the majority view–not then, not now.
What, then, are the major Conspiracies, or isms, of American life? I think we can identify four, in particular.
1. The notion of Americans as the “chosen people,” and of the nation as a “city on a hill.” This latter phrase–quoted by both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential campaign–goes back to the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, as he was sailing from England to America on the Arabella in 1630:
“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us....He shall
make us a praise and glory....For we must Consider that we
shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
The idea is that it would be America’s unique mission to bring democracy to all the peoples of the earth, inasmuch as the American way of life was (obviously) the best. (Iraq is merely the latest manifestation of this way of thinking.) In fact, the Puritans took the Jews of the Old Testament as their model, in which the exodus from Egypt, and invasion of Canaan, was regarded as the paradigm for the establishment of the Colonies. Cotton Mather even referred to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “our American Jerusalem.” The notion that the story of the United States is the primary manifestation of God’s will on earth has an enormous hold on the American psyche. “American exceptionalism,” Alexis de Tocqueville called it; it is with us to this day.
2. Along with this we have Ism No. 2: the existence, in the United States, of a “civil religion.” This was first pointed out by the sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967, the fact that despite the presence of Catholicism, Judaism, and numerous Protestant sects in America, the real religion of the American people was America itself. To be an American is regarded (unconsciously, by Americans) as an ideological/religious commitment, not an accident of birth. This is why critics of the US are immediately labeled “un-American,” and are practically regarded as traitors. (Quite ridiculous, when you think about it: can you imagine a Swedish critic of Sweden, for example, being attacked as “un-Swedish”?) The historian Sidney Mead pegged it correctly when he called America “the nation with the soul of a church,” while another historian, Richard Hofstadter, declared that “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.” As Graham Greene portrayed it in The Quiet American, this is not a position that encourages self-reflection.
3. The third unconscious mythology is the one identified by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893: the existence of a supposedly endless frontier, into which the American people would expand geographically. Eventually, it became an economic frontier, and finally an imperial one–Manifest Destiny gone global. This lay at the heart of the Carter-Reagan debate, for the notion of limits to growth is almost a form of heresy in an American context. The American Dream envisions a world without limits, in which the goal, as the gangster (played by Edward G. Robinson) tells Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, is simply “more”. De Tocqueville had already, in the 1830s, commented on the great “restlessness” of the American people; and more than a century later, the British journalist Alistair Cooke remarked that what were regarded as luxuries throughout most of the world, were regarded as necessities in the United States. If Americans never had much of an interest in socialism, they probably had even less interest in buddhism, the occasional Zen center notwithstanding. It was not for nothing that the historian William Leach entitled his study of late-nineteenth-century American expansionism, Land of Desire.
4. Finally, we have a national character based on extreme individualism–Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” As the historian Joyce Appleby describes it, this originated in the shift in the definition of the word “virtue” that took place in the Colonies in the 1790s. Previous to that time, the word had a European (or even classical) definition, namely “the capacity of some men to rise above private interests and devote themselves to the public good.” By 1800, the definition had undergone a complete inversion: “virtue” now meant the capacity to look out for oneself in an opportunistic environment. Whereas the former definition was adhered to by the Federalists, the Jeffersonian Republicans actively promoted the latter definition, as part of the new nation’s break with England and all things European. Life was not to be about service to the community, but rather about competition and acquisition of goods. This is summarized in the popular American expression, “There is no free lunch.” The “self-made man” is expected to make it on his own.
There have been very few dissenters to this fourth ism; in many ways, American history can be seen as the story of a nation consistently choosing individual solutions over collective ones. One American who did dissent, however, was Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions he wrote: “The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin.”
And “ruin” is the operative word here. While there is certainly an upside to these four isms–the sunny side of technological innovation and the Yankee “can-do” mentality, for example–in the long run these unconscious mythologies, in dialectical fashion, began to turn against those caught up in their magic spell. It surely cannot be an accident that 25% of all the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in American jails (1% of the entire US adult population); that two-thirds of the world’s consumption of antidepressants occurs in the United States; that 24% of the American population say that it’s OK to use violence in the pursuit of one’s goals, 44% support the torture of alleged or suspected terrorists, and 39% want Muslims in the US to be required to carry a religious ID on them at all times (why not just make it a yellow star, and be done with it?); that the country has the greatest percentage of single-person dwellings in the world, the highest homicide rate, the largest military budget (by several orders of magnitude), and the greatest number of square feet of shopping malls on the surface of the planet. The data on ignorance, which I have documented elsewhere, are breathtaking, and Robert Putnam’s description (in Bowling Alone) of the collapse of community, trust, and friendship is one of the saddest things I have ever read. Dialectically, and ironically, American “success” became American ruin; the crash of October 2008 was merely the tip of the iceberg.
The power of isms, certainly in the American case, derives from the fact that they are unconscious, embedded deep in the psyche. They constitute Conspiracies in that those who hold them are like marionettes on strings, screaming “Obama!” (for example) without realizing that the new president can no more buck the elites running the country than he can dismantle the mythologies that drive its citizens–himself included. As for the individual, so for the nation: the only hope is to see ourselves as we are seen, from the outside, as it were. And therein lies the paradox. For the four Conspiracies close in on themselves, forming a kind of mirror-lined glass sphere that does not permit any dissonant information to enter. Sandel, Mills, Rothkopf, Bellah, Mead, Leach, Appleby, Putnam–America’s finest, really–will never become household words, and if they did, it would probably be as objects of contempt. For this is finally the most terrifying thing about isms or Conspiracies: we do not choose them; rather, it is they that choose us.
©Morris Berman, 2008
October 26, 2008
September 28, 2008
A Show About Nothing
Dear Friends,
As I mentioned a while back, I'm the "columnista internacional" for a quarterly cultural journal in Mexico. Theme of next issue is humor. Below, my contribution (English version). Enjoy!--mb
One of the most successful sitcoms in the history of American television was the show Seinfeld, which debuted in 1989 and ran continuously through 1998. The principal scriptwriters, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, originally pitched it to NBC as “a show about nothing,” because their idea was that the individual episodes would have no plot and instead focus on the trivia of everyday life. For the most part, they stuck to the plan, and the show proved to be hysterically funny. It was also, I’m proud to say, very much a case of Jewish humor, which some might argue is humor at its best. As Freud pointed out in his famous book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a joke is never just a joke; it masks a subtext, an intention that is typically very different from what is being overtly expressed. And in the case of Jewish humor, that subtext is almost always sad, depressing, or even tragic. The function of the joke is to ease the pain.
My maternal grandfather, who virtually raised me, told lots of jokes of this sort. He even compiled a book of aphorisms, based on the east European oral tradition, ones that had this kind of twist to them. (It was published in Wilno, Poland, in Yiddish in 1930.) One of his favorite jokes–it may have even been a true story, for all I know–was about a man who went to his doctor for his annual checkup. The doctor examined him, took blood, etc., but was unable to collect a urine specimen because the man did not have the urge to go at that particular moment. “Drop it off tomorrow,” the doctor told him. The man went home, got up the next morning, peed in a jar, and then had a bright idea: the family was too poor for everyone to have a medical exam; why not have them all pee in the same jar, so that unbeknownst to the doctor, the entire family could get analyzed at the same time? So the wife and children were added to the mix, and as the man was leaving his house to go to the doctor’s he decided he might as well throw in a sample from the family horse, which was tethered to a tree in the front yard. He then brought the jar to the doctor’s office. “Come back next week,” the doctor said, “and I’ll give you the results.” The man left and returned in seven days. “Everything seems to be fine,” said the doctor; “the only thing I would recommend is that you cut down on your intake of oats.”
Funny, yes? But the humor masks a situation that was daily fare for the Jews of eastern Europe: extreme poverty. In fact, my grandfather told me that at one point the family managed to survive by eating the plaster off the door jambs of the house they were living in. Nothing funny about that.
In the case of the Seinfeld scripts, Jerry provided the upbeat, overt aspect of the show’s humor, while Larry David supplied the subtext. Larry’s vision, especially about America, was quite dark. As a result, there is an undercurrent in the episodes, one which says that the United States is a country in which friendship is pretty much a sham and community nonexistent; a society where nobody gives a damn about anybody else. This is true not only in the way that the four central characters–Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer–relate to those outside their little circle, but also in the way they relate to each other. They often talk simultaneously, “through” each other, as though the other person weren’t even present. All four of them appear to have only one motive: advancement of their own personal and immediate goals. In a word, the show is actually about the callousness, the almost autistic indifference, of daily life in America; and this is revealed in episode after episode. Just off the top of my head, the following vignettes come to mind:
-Elaine and Jerry are sitting in a coffee shop when they are approached by a man who explains that his son is a big fan of Jerry’s, and loves watching him when he appears on TV. It turns out that the boy has some rare immune-deficiency disease that requires him to live in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble. As he talks about his little “bubble boy,” the man begins to weep. Elaine, also crying, reaches for the napkin holder and hands napkins to the man and Jerry. She and the man wipe their eyes; Jerry, who is calmly munching on a sandwich, matter-of-factly wipes his mouth.
-George and his girlfriend Susan drive north from New York City for a holiday weekend at her grandfather’s cabin. George gives Susan money to pay the tolls en route. It turns out that Kramer visited the cabin a bit earlier and accidentally left a lit cigar behind–one that Susan’s father had given to George, who in turn had given to Kramer. By the time George and Susan arrive at the cabin, the place is engulfed in flames. Susan screams, “Oh my God, the cabin ” George turns to her and says, “I just remembered: I don’t think you gave me the change from the money I gave you for the tolls.”
-A scene at a funeral, being held for an acquaintance of Jerry’s and Elaine’s who was killed in an auto accident. They are sitting in church (or synagogue), waiting for the service to begin. In the background, we hear the periodic sobbing of the family members. Elaine turns to Jerry and says, “I really have to get some new clothes. I’m bored with everything I have.” Pause; more sobbing, which is now much louder. “Really,” she continues, “I have absolutely nothing to wear.”
-Another funeral, this time for one of Jerry’s relatives. Elaine is hell-bent on getting the deceased’s rent-controlled apartment. As she moves forward in the receiving line to express her condolences, she finally shakes the hand of an elderly relative of the deceased, who happens to be hard of hearing, and yells in his ear, “So what about the apartment?”
-George is attending the birthday party of his current girlfriend’s little boy. At some point, someone burns a hamburger in the kitchen, and smoke starts pouring out the kitchen door. “Fire ” yells George, “Fire ”, as he makes for the front door of the house, knocking over old women and little children in his path.
-As if to deliberately mock the notion of community (or lack thereof), there is an episode in which Kramer takes photos of everyone in the building and posts them, along with the corresponding name of each person, on the wall of the foyer, just inside the entrance. The idea is that the residents will now be able to greet each other by name. The whole thing is too phony to be believed, especially when the tenants begin kissing one another when they meet–a common practice in Mexico and other countries, but totally inappropriate in the United States. Jerry, who can’t stand the bullshit involved, opts out, refusing to kiss and hug, and thereby becomes the target of much public hostility.
All of this reaches a kind of climax in the very last episode of the show, in which the Larry David and Jerry make their opinion of the nature of American social life quite clear. In this ninety-minute finale, the Fab Four are arrested in Massachusetts for ignoring a (nonexistent, in real life) “Good Samaritan Law,” whereby one is supposedly required to come to the aid of other people in distress. They are put on trial, and practically everyone from the show’s nine years of episodes flies into this small New England town to watch the proceedings or actually take the witness stand and describe to the judge and jury how abusively they had been treated by the gang. It is at this point that the Seinfeld episodes are revealed for what they were: all of these jokes had something very ugly underneath them. Other people were merely pawns in (or obstacles to) Jerry’s, Elaine’s, George’s, or Kramer’s personal agenda. Humor aside, the scriptwriters leave no doubt that their vision of American life is quite bleak. When Jerry phones his lawyer, “Jackie Chiles” (a Johnnie Cochran look-alike), to explain that they were arrested for not coming to someone’s aid, Jackie explodes with indignation: “Why, that’s ridiculous!” he barks. “You don’t have to help anybody. That’s what this country is all about!” As the popular American expression has it, He got that one right.
The trial over, the judge sentences our heroes to a year in jail, commenting that “your callous disregard for other human beings threatens to rock the very foundations of society.” But which society? Larry and Jerry make it quite clear that in their view, callous disregard for other human beings is the foundation of society–American society, that is. And so the subtext finally breaks through in no uncertain terms: Seinfeld was A Show About Something, after all.
As I mentioned a while back, I'm the "columnista internacional" for a quarterly cultural journal in Mexico. Theme of next issue is humor. Below, my contribution (English version). Enjoy!--mb
One of the most successful sitcoms in the history of American television was the show Seinfeld, which debuted in 1989 and ran continuously through 1998. The principal scriptwriters, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, originally pitched it to NBC as “a show about nothing,” because their idea was that the individual episodes would have no plot and instead focus on the trivia of everyday life. For the most part, they stuck to the plan, and the show proved to be hysterically funny. It was also, I’m proud to say, very much a case of Jewish humor, which some might argue is humor at its best. As Freud pointed out in his famous book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a joke is never just a joke; it masks a subtext, an intention that is typically very different from what is being overtly expressed. And in the case of Jewish humor, that subtext is almost always sad, depressing, or even tragic. The function of the joke is to ease the pain.
My maternal grandfather, who virtually raised me, told lots of jokes of this sort. He even compiled a book of aphorisms, based on the east European oral tradition, ones that had this kind of twist to them. (It was published in Wilno, Poland, in Yiddish in 1930.) One of his favorite jokes–it may have even been a true story, for all I know–was about a man who went to his doctor for his annual checkup. The doctor examined him, took blood, etc., but was unable to collect a urine specimen because the man did not have the urge to go at that particular moment. “Drop it off tomorrow,” the doctor told him. The man went home, got up the next morning, peed in a jar, and then had a bright idea: the family was too poor for everyone to have a medical exam; why not have them all pee in the same jar, so that unbeknownst to the doctor, the entire family could get analyzed at the same time? So the wife and children were added to the mix, and as the man was leaving his house to go to the doctor’s he decided he might as well throw in a sample from the family horse, which was tethered to a tree in the front yard. He then brought the jar to the doctor’s office. “Come back next week,” the doctor said, “and I’ll give you the results.” The man left and returned in seven days. “Everything seems to be fine,” said the doctor; “the only thing I would recommend is that you cut down on your intake of oats.”
Funny, yes? But the humor masks a situation that was daily fare for the Jews of eastern Europe: extreme poverty. In fact, my grandfather told me that at one point the family managed to survive by eating the plaster off the door jambs of the house they were living in. Nothing funny about that.
In the case of the Seinfeld scripts, Jerry provided the upbeat, overt aspect of the show’s humor, while Larry David supplied the subtext. Larry’s vision, especially about America, was quite dark. As a result, there is an undercurrent in the episodes, one which says that the United States is a country in which friendship is pretty much a sham and community nonexistent; a society where nobody gives a damn about anybody else. This is true not only in the way that the four central characters–Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer–relate to those outside their little circle, but also in the way they relate to each other. They often talk simultaneously, “through” each other, as though the other person weren’t even present. All four of them appear to have only one motive: advancement of their own personal and immediate goals. In a word, the show is actually about the callousness, the almost autistic indifference, of daily life in America; and this is revealed in episode after episode. Just off the top of my head, the following vignettes come to mind:
-Elaine and Jerry are sitting in a coffee shop when they are approached by a man who explains that his son is a big fan of Jerry’s, and loves watching him when he appears on TV. It turns out that the boy has some rare immune-deficiency disease that requires him to live in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble. As he talks about his little “bubble boy,” the man begins to weep. Elaine, also crying, reaches for the napkin holder and hands napkins to the man and Jerry. She and the man wipe their eyes; Jerry, who is calmly munching on a sandwich, matter-of-factly wipes his mouth.
-George and his girlfriend Susan drive north from New York City for a holiday weekend at her grandfather’s cabin. George gives Susan money to pay the tolls en route. It turns out that Kramer visited the cabin a bit earlier and accidentally left a lit cigar behind–one that Susan’s father had given to George, who in turn had given to Kramer. By the time George and Susan arrive at the cabin, the place is engulfed in flames. Susan screams, “Oh my God, the cabin ” George turns to her and says, “I just remembered: I don’t think you gave me the change from the money I gave you for the tolls.”
-A scene at a funeral, being held for an acquaintance of Jerry’s and Elaine’s who was killed in an auto accident. They are sitting in church (or synagogue), waiting for the service to begin. In the background, we hear the periodic sobbing of the family members. Elaine turns to Jerry and says, “I really have to get some new clothes. I’m bored with everything I have.” Pause; more sobbing, which is now much louder. “Really,” she continues, “I have absolutely nothing to wear.”
-Another funeral, this time for one of Jerry’s relatives. Elaine is hell-bent on getting the deceased’s rent-controlled apartment. As she moves forward in the receiving line to express her condolences, she finally shakes the hand of an elderly relative of the deceased, who happens to be hard of hearing, and yells in his ear, “So what about the apartment?”
-George is attending the birthday party of his current girlfriend’s little boy. At some point, someone burns a hamburger in the kitchen, and smoke starts pouring out the kitchen door. “Fire ” yells George, “Fire ”, as he makes for the front door of the house, knocking over old women and little children in his path.
-As if to deliberately mock the notion of community (or lack thereof), there is an episode in which Kramer takes photos of everyone in the building and posts them, along with the corresponding name of each person, on the wall of the foyer, just inside the entrance. The idea is that the residents will now be able to greet each other by name. The whole thing is too phony to be believed, especially when the tenants begin kissing one another when they meet–a common practice in Mexico and other countries, but totally inappropriate in the United States. Jerry, who can’t stand the bullshit involved, opts out, refusing to kiss and hug, and thereby becomes the target of much public hostility.
All of this reaches a kind of climax in the very last episode of the show, in which the Larry David and Jerry make their opinion of the nature of American social life quite clear. In this ninety-minute finale, the Fab Four are arrested in Massachusetts for ignoring a (nonexistent, in real life) “Good Samaritan Law,” whereby one is supposedly required to come to the aid of other people in distress. They are put on trial, and practically everyone from the show’s nine years of episodes flies into this small New England town to watch the proceedings or actually take the witness stand and describe to the judge and jury how abusively they had been treated by the gang. It is at this point that the Seinfeld episodes are revealed for what they were: all of these jokes had something very ugly underneath them. Other people were merely pawns in (or obstacles to) Jerry’s, Elaine’s, George’s, or Kramer’s personal agenda. Humor aside, the scriptwriters leave no doubt that their vision of American life is quite bleak. When Jerry phones his lawyer, “Jackie Chiles” (a Johnnie Cochran look-alike), to explain that they were arrested for not coming to someone’s aid, Jackie explodes with indignation: “Why, that’s ridiculous!” he barks. “You don’t have to help anybody. That’s what this country is all about!” As the popular American expression has it, He got that one right.
The trial over, the judge sentences our heroes to a year in jail, commenting that “your callous disregard for other human beings threatens to rock the very foundations of society.” But which society? Larry and Jerry make it quite clear that in their view, callous disregard for other human beings is the foundation of society–American society, that is. And so the subtext finally breaks through in no uncertain terms: Seinfeld was A Show About Something, after all.
September 02, 2008
No Time to Think
Dear Friends:
"No Time to Think" is the title of a lecture given a few months ago by David Levy of the University of Washington at the Google Corporation. I found it very thought provoking, and wrote Prof. Levy a response. Thought you all might be interested in this. First, here's the link to the lecture:
http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=KHGcvj3JiGA
And here's my response:
Dear Prof. Levy:
Someone recently sent me the video of your March lecture on the matter of information overload. I thought the history of the problem, as you presented it, was terrific. (I cover some of this, BTW--esp. the control revolution, rise of the corporation, and rise of advertising--in my book "The Twilight of American Culture".) The case you make for the need for quiet space, related to creativity, is obviously an important one.
I also enjoyed the photo you reproduced of the billboard in Northern California, telling us to "fill your head." I teach at a university in Mexico City, and 2 weeks ago was driving through town with my dean (dept. of humanities), when we passed a billboard ad for cell phones, which had the caption--in English, for some reason--"KILL SILENCE". Says it all, I thought. My dean suggested that I was "fixated" on the matter of cell phones pervading our culture. Later, I realized that this was to frame the topic upside down: it's the *culture* that's fixated--on cell phones and related toys; I'm just pointing out the fixation. But from the world view of a fixated culture, of course, I'm the one who is going to appear "fixated". (Depends on where you are standing, I guess, as Archimedes showed us long ago; Tom Stoppard, more recently.)
I've slowly been working on a book over the past couple of years tentatively titled "Progress and Its Shadow." Meanwhile, I discovered that someone named Eric Cohen beat me to it (sort of--although I have yet to read the book) with his own title, "In the Shadow of Progress." In addition, the last couple of years have witnessed a fleet of articles on the subject of backlash--that multitasking and all of these toys actually *decrease* productivity (to the tune of a lost $650 billion to US industry in 2007). Thus there was a recent article in The Atlantic on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", and a number of essays on the detrimental effects of multitasking.
The real problem I see in dealing with the shadow is, I have to say, something I feel you missed in your presentation, namely, that technology is not neutral. We commonly believe that it is merely a tool, like a razor blade: you can slice salami, or your wrists; it's a matter of choice. But as writers from Herbert Marcuse to Marshall McLuhan have shown, tech is very far from neutral; it changes the environment in which we operate, until the medium becomes the message. (In Marcuse's language, modern tech is "purposive-rational"; it shatters the context.) Hence, when you talk about creating "contemplative space" within a virtual setting, or of having people bring their laptops into quiet areas of a library (and how is it, that libraries now have to have "quiet areas"? I thought the idea of the library was that it be *entirely* quiet)--well, these are really just technological fixes, it seems to me. And they won't work: you bring a laptop into a library, and ultimately it becomes a different sort of place. The problem with the yogic response, of being a "lotus in a cesspool," so to speak, is that eventually what you get is not a transformed cesspool, but rather a dirty lotus. Or to put it another way: sure, you can read the work of Lao-Tzu online, but this is not what a virtual environment is designed to do. People don't lose weight from diet cheesecake, and the physical environment is not going to be saved by hybrid cars. Your solutions, noble though they are, will eventually be overwhelmed by the context, by the nature of the technology and the momentum of a culture based on expansion and innovation.
By way of comparison, consider the history of our solutions to previous overload situations, such as the control revolution, or the rise of advertising: the remedies were worse than the disease, don't you think? Corporations are now destroying the planet, the worker, or the possibility for a healthy way of life; advertising is--well, no need for me to elaborate on the manufacture of false needs, I'm guessing. We now have three choices regarding the information overload problem, inasmuch as these intermediate possibilities you are suggesting--halfway houses, really--finally won't (imo) change the larger picture.
The first would be legislation regarding the use of technology in public. For example, there are 5 contemplative areas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY--or used to be, anyway. Now, people sit in those spaces and talk on their cell phones, destroying the ambience for which the spaces were originally designed. The problem with legislation is that no one is willing to enforce it. The guards certainly don't care; and the Met can't afford to lose "customers". Legislation regarding the use of cell phones in cars (the source of a huge number of auto accidents every year) has been notoriously ineffective. Nor will it stop the multitasking that goes on at work, quite obviously--employers think it's groovy, even though it's actually costing them millions or billions of dollars every year. I think it's a good bet that the world described by one of the authors you cite, Thomas Hyland Eriksen ("Tyranny of the Moment") will continue unabated, at least for the next few decades.
The second is to physically alter the brain so as to adapt it to hyper-busyness, multitasking, and the new technologies. Francis Fukuyama discusses this a bit in "Our Posthuman Future," and other scholars, such as Maryanne Wolf at Tufts, has written about how digital technology is actually rewiring the brain. Human identity, after all, has not changed in the last 100,000 years (when Homo sapiens sapiens 1st appeared), since the physical brain has not changed in that time period (this being a time span too short for biological evolution). So the "answer," much like the rise of the corporation or advertising, is to force the human being to be like the technology. Prozac, in effect, has already been doing something of this sort, and it should come as no surprise that 2/3 of the anti-depressant drugs consumed in the world are consumed by Americans. This is the Brave New World "solution"; sad to say, I think it is likely.
But it doesn't preclude the 3rd solution, namely, that the whole system, the arc of capitalism itself, from the Commercial Revolution of the 16th century to the Tech-Communications Revolution of the 21st, will finally break down. This strikes me as being *very* likely, and the whole literature of World Systems Analysis (Wallerstein, Chase-Dunn, et al.) supports this view. After all, we didn't leave the Middle Ages voluntarily; it was no easy passage--in fact, the Plague was probably the least difficult part of it(!). This too has been heavily documented by hundreds of historians, and if these sorts of major transitions are any guide, what we shall eventually go through will be nothing short of catastrophic. And I suspect that solution #2, physically altering the brain, will be part of this process. A recent review of one of my books, "Dark Ages America," states that the core of the book is the argument that "the empire we so greatly desire is the destruction we ultimately obtain." That summary seems relevant to the matter of solution #3.
Thank you, in any case, for a stimulating lecture, and for allowing me to bend your ear (eye?) in response.
With kind regards,
Morris Berman
"No Time to Think" is the title of a lecture given a few months ago by David Levy of the University of Washington at the Google Corporation. I found it very thought provoking, and wrote Prof. Levy a response. Thought you all might be interested in this. First, here's the link to the lecture:
http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=KHGcvj3JiGA
And here's my response:
Dear Prof. Levy:
Someone recently sent me the video of your March lecture on the matter of information overload. I thought the history of the problem, as you presented it, was terrific. (I cover some of this, BTW--esp. the control revolution, rise of the corporation, and rise of advertising--in my book "The Twilight of American Culture".) The case you make for the need for quiet space, related to creativity, is obviously an important one.
I also enjoyed the photo you reproduced of the billboard in Northern California, telling us to "fill your head." I teach at a university in Mexico City, and 2 weeks ago was driving through town with my dean (dept. of humanities), when we passed a billboard ad for cell phones, which had the caption--in English, for some reason--"KILL SILENCE". Says it all, I thought. My dean suggested that I was "fixated" on the matter of cell phones pervading our culture. Later, I realized that this was to frame the topic upside down: it's the *culture* that's fixated--on cell phones and related toys; I'm just pointing out the fixation. But from the world view of a fixated culture, of course, I'm the one who is going to appear "fixated". (Depends on where you are standing, I guess, as Archimedes showed us long ago; Tom Stoppard, more recently.)
I've slowly been working on a book over the past couple of years tentatively titled "Progress and Its Shadow." Meanwhile, I discovered that someone named Eric Cohen beat me to it (sort of--although I have yet to read the book) with his own title, "In the Shadow of Progress." In addition, the last couple of years have witnessed a fleet of articles on the subject of backlash--that multitasking and all of these toys actually *decrease* productivity (to the tune of a lost $650 billion to US industry in 2007). Thus there was a recent article in The Atlantic on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", and a number of essays on the detrimental effects of multitasking.
The real problem I see in dealing with the shadow is, I have to say, something I feel you missed in your presentation, namely, that technology is not neutral. We commonly believe that it is merely a tool, like a razor blade: you can slice salami, or your wrists; it's a matter of choice. But as writers from Herbert Marcuse to Marshall McLuhan have shown, tech is very far from neutral; it changes the environment in which we operate, until the medium becomes the message. (In Marcuse's language, modern tech is "purposive-rational"; it shatters the context.) Hence, when you talk about creating "contemplative space" within a virtual setting, or of having people bring their laptops into quiet areas of a library (and how is it, that libraries now have to have "quiet areas"? I thought the idea of the library was that it be *entirely* quiet)--well, these are really just technological fixes, it seems to me. And they won't work: you bring a laptop into a library, and ultimately it becomes a different sort of place. The problem with the yogic response, of being a "lotus in a cesspool," so to speak, is that eventually what you get is not a transformed cesspool, but rather a dirty lotus. Or to put it another way: sure, you can read the work of Lao-Tzu online, but this is not what a virtual environment is designed to do. People don't lose weight from diet cheesecake, and the physical environment is not going to be saved by hybrid cars. Your solutions, noble though they are, will eventually be overwhelmed by the context, by the nature of the technology and the momentum of a culture based on expansion and innovation.
By way of comparison, consider the history of our solutions to previous overload situations, such as the control revolution, or the rise of advertising: the remedies were worse than the disease, don't you think? Corporations are now destroying the planet, the worker, or the possibility for a healthy way of life; advertising is--well, no need for me to elaborate on the manufacture of false needs, I'm guessing. We now have three choices regarding the information overload problem, inasmuch as these intermediate possibilities you are suggesting--halfway houses, really--finally won't (imo) change the larger picture.
The first would be legislation regarding the use of technology in public. For example, there are 5 contemplative areas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY--or used to be, anyway. Now, people sit in those spaces and talk on their cell phones, destroying the ambience for which the spaces were originally designed. The problem with legislation is that no one is willing to enforce it. The guards certainly don't care; and the Met can't afford to lose "customers". Legislation regarding the use of cell phones in cars (the source of a huge number of auto accidents every year) has been notoriously ineffective. Nor will it stop the multitasking that goes on at work, quite obviously--employers think it's groovy, even though it's actually costing them millions or billions of dollars every year. I think it's a good bet that the world described by one of the authors you cite, Thomas Hyland Eriksen ("Tyranny of the Moment") will continue unabated, at least for the next few decades.
The second is to physically alter the brain so as to adapt it to hyper-busyness, multitasking, and the new technologies. Francis Fukuyama discusses this a bit in "Our Posthuman Future," and other scholars, such as Maryanne Wolf at Tufts, has written about how digital technology is actually rewiring the brain. Human identity, after all, has not changed in the last 100,000 years (when Homo sapiens sapiens 1st appeared), since the physical brain has not changed in that time period (this being a time span too short for biological evolution). So the "answer," much like the rise of the corporation or advertising, is to force the human being to be like the technology. Prozac, in effect, has already been doing something of this sort, and it should come as no surprise that 2/3 of the anti-depressant drugs consumed in the world are consumed by Americans. This is the Brave New World "solution"; sad to say, I think it is likely.
But it doesn't preclude the 3rd solution, namely, that the whole system, the arc of capitalism itself, from the Commercial Revolution of the 16th century to the Tech-Communications Revolution of the 21st, will finally break down. This strikes me as being *very* likely, and the whole literature of World Systems Analysis (Wallerstein, Chase-Dunn, et al.) supports this view. After all, we didn't leave the Middle Ages voluntarily; it was no easy passage--in fact, the Plague was probably the least difficult part of it(!). This too has been heavily documented by hundreds of historians, and if these sorts of major transitions are any guide, what we shall eventually go through will be nothing short of catastrophic. And I suspect that solution #2, physically altering the brain, will be part of this process. A recent review of one of my books, "Dark Ages America," states that the core of the book is the argument that "the empire we so greatly desire is the destruction we ultimately obtain." That summary seems relevant to the matter of solution #3.
Thank you, in any case, for a stimulating lecture, and for allowing me to bend your ear (eye?) in response.
With kind regards,
Morris Berman
June 22, 2008
Interview with Jari Chevalier
Dear Friends,
An artist and educator, Jari Chevalier, did an interview with me about a month ago and then recently posted it on her blog as a podcast. It was unusual for me in that her questions were primarily directed toward my consciousness trilogy (published over 1981-2000), rather than the two books I wrote on the American empire. It's about an hour long. The link is as follows, for those of you who might want to listen to it:
http://jari.podbean.com/2008/06/17/interview-with-morris-berman/
One caveat, however: when I first tried to listen to this by clicking on the purple "Listen Now" icon at the bottom, all that came out was high-speed gibberish, as though it were an old 33 LP being played at 78. If this happens to you, you should have better luck by right-clicking on the green text, "Download this episode," and following her instructions for Windows or Mac.
Hope you like it!
-mb
An artist and educator, Jari Chevalier, did an interview with me about a month ago and then recently posted it on her blog as a podcast. It was unusual for me in that her questions were primarily directed toward my consciousness trilogy (published over 1981-2000), rather than the two books I wrote on the American empire. It's about an hour long. The link is as follows, for those of you who might want to listen to it:
http://jari.podbean.com/2008/06/17/interview-with-morris-berman/
One caveat, however: when I first tried to listen to this by clicking on the purple "Listen Now" icon at the bottom, all that came out was high-speed gibberish, as though it were an old 33 LP being played at 78. If this happens to you, you should have better luck by right-clicking on the green text, "Download this episode," and following her instructions for Windows or Mac.
Hope you like it!
-mb
June 01, 2008
Let's Get Real
Dear Friends,
I don't usually post other people's work on this website, but I thought this article by John Pilger, the British journalist, on Barack Obama was too important to pass up, especially in view of the fact that most Americans have not read "Dark Ages America" and would hate it if they did. (I encourage you to cut, paste, and circulate this essay.) For those of you who did read it, you may remember I said that it was virtually impossible to get elected president if you did not support corporate America's agenda and the national security state. The following essay strikes me as being an important antidote to the naive belief that Mr. Obama somehow represents a radical alternative to the status quo, or that the November election represents some sort of watershed in American history.
Published on Saturday, May 31, 2008 by The New Statesman (UK)
After Bobby Kennedy (There Was Barack Obama)
by John Pilger
In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times. He would “return government to the people” and bestow “dignity and justice” on the oppressed. “As Bernard Shaw once said,” he would say, “‘Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?’” That was the signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.
Kennedy’s campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war’s conquest of other people’s land and resources, but because it was “unwinnable”.
Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism’s last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for “leadership” and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.
In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.
“These people love you,” I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.
“Yes, yes, sure they love me,” he replied. “I love them!” I asked him how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy? “Philosophy? Well, it’s based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said.”
“That’s what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?”
“How . . . by charting a new direction for America.”
The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well “chart a new direction for America” in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.
Embarrassing Truth
As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America’s divine right to control all before it. “We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good,” said Obama. “We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added].” McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing “terrorists” he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn’t quarrel.
Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel’s starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people” to now read: “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added].” Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, “is a threat to all of us”.
On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years (instead of “100 years”, his earlier option). Obama has now “reserved the right” to change his pledge to get troops out next year. “I will listen to our commanders on the ground,” he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to support Bush’s demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers embrace McCain’s proposal for an aggressive “league of democracies”, led by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.
Amusingly, both have denounced their “preachers” for speaking out. Whereas McCain’s man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic white holy-rollers, Obama’s man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a consequence of the violence of US power across the world. The media demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the Bush lie that “terrorists attacked America because they hate our freedoms”. So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was rooted not “primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel”, but in “the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam”. Journalists applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.
The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner, founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: “There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon ‘the better angels of our nature’.” At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane confessed: “I know it shouldn’t be happening, but it is. I’m falling for John McCain.” His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings for McCain, he wrote, were like “the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls”.
The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. “Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors,” wrote the investigator Pam Martens, “consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.” A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. “Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, “they won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.
What is Obama’s attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s. By offering a “new”, young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush’s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.
Piracies and Dangers
America’s war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which, the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or subversion against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa’s oil and other riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia’s borders, the Cold War is back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.
Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and read.
On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches British liberalism’s equivalent last fling. Most of the “philosophy” of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class-based economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory, distinguishable from Blair’s new Labour only in the personality of its leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.
I don't usually post other people's work on this website, but I thought this article by John Pilger, the British journalist, on Barack Obama was too important to pass up, especially in view of the fact that most Americans have not read "Dark Ages America" and would hate it if they did. (I encourage you to cut, paste, and circulate this essay.) For those of you who did read it, you may remember I said that it was virtually impossible to get elected president if you did not support corporate America's agenda and the national security state. The following essay strikes me as being an important antidote to the naive belief that Mr. Obama somehow represents a radical alternative to the status quo, or that the November election represents some sort of watershed in American history.
Published on Saturday, May 31, 2008 by The New Statesman (UK)
After Bobby Kennedy (There Was Barack Obama)
by John Pilger
In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times. He would “return government to the people” and bestow “dignity and justice” on the oppressed. “As Bernard Shaw once said,” he would say, “‘Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?’” That was the signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.
Kennedy’s campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war’s conquest of other people’s land and resources, but because it was “unwinnable”.
Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism’s last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for “leadership” and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.
In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.
“These people love you,” I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.
“Yes, yes, sure they love me,” he replied. “I love them!” I asked him how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy? “Philosophy? Well, it’s based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said.”
“That’s what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?”
“How . . . by charting a new direction for America.”
The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well “chart a new direction for America” in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.
Embarrassing Truth
As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America’s divine right to control all before it. “We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good,” said Obama. “We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added].” McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing “terrorists” he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn’t quarrel.
Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel’s starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people” to now read: “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added].” Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, “is a threat to all of us”.
On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years (instead of “100 years”, his earlier option). Obama has now “reserved the right” to change his pledge to get troops out next year. “I will listen to our commanders on the ground,” he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to support Bush’s demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers embrace McCain’s proposal for an aggressive “league of democracies”, led by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.
Amusingly, both have denounced their “preachers” for speaking out. Whereas McCain’s man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic white holy-rollers, Obama’s man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a consequence of the violence of US power across the world. The media demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the Bush lie that “terrorists attacked America because they hate our freedoms”. So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was rooted not “primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel”, but in “the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam”. Journalists applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.
The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner, founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: “There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon ‘the better angels of our nature’.” At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane confessed: “I know it shouldn’t be happening, but it is. I’m falling for John McCain.” His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings for McCain, he wrote, were like “the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls”.
The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. “Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors,” wrote the investigator Pam Martens, “consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.” A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. “Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, “they won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.
What is Obama’s attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s. By offering a “new”, young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush’s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.
Piracies and Dangers
America’s war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which, the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or subversion against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa’s oil and other riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia’s borders, the Cold War is back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.
Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and read.
On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches British liberalism’s equivalent last fling. Most of the “philosophy” of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class-based economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory, distinguishable from Blair’s new Labour only in the personality of its leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.
May 16, 2008
Love and Death
“In everyone there sleeps/A sense of life lived according to love.”
–Philip Larkin, “Faith Healing”
Two years ago an American journalist wrote that “The death instinct hovers over the United States.” I had known this for some time, of course; when you turn yourself into a late-empire killing machine, what other outcome could there be? But the phrase “death instinct,” so stark and Freudian in its implications, really caught my attention. Long before Freud, poets and novelists had written of the intimate connection between love and death, eros and thanatos. Indeed, when the former gets blocked or thwarted, it turns into the latter, its opposite. Check out the body language of Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice, if you don’t believe me.
Since the 1960s, America has been seen as the land of hedonism, the place where “anything goes.” But the truth is that this is a thin veneer placed over a much deeper puritan reality. “Scratch an American,” wrote one astute historian in the late sixties, “and you find a Puritan.” It’s much worse now than it was forty years ago, of course; “political correctness” is nothing if not a puritan movement. Thus I was recently contacted by a German journalist living in Washington, DC, who expressed her horror at a number of current news items. One involved a situation in which the parents of a two-year-old had their child playing in their backyard, in a diaper, and the next-door neighbors called the police to report this case of “indecent exposure.” The police, instead of suggesting that the neighbors check themselves into the nearest mental institution, came to the parents’ house and ordered them to put some clothes on the child.
Another situation she reported to me involved that of a six-year-old boy who wrote a note to a classmate, telling her “I love you.” The little girl showed the note to her parents, who then descended on the school principal, choking with anxiety. The principal could have pointed out how sweet this love note was, how touching. Instead, he inflicted permanent emotional damage on the little boy by suspending him from school for three days. Clearly, hatred of life is a terrifying thing.
The flip side of this, as battalions of sociologists have pointed out, is pornography. By this I don’t mean merely the tons of pictures and videos on the Internet, but, along with the militarization of American life, the sexualization of it. Sex permeates the public sphere in the United States in a way that is so pervasive that it has become part of the air we breathe. Television, advertising, films, you name it–sex is somehow always present. And yet, what does it really come down to? Recent studies of American sexual behavior reveal that actual sexual activity is way down, from years past; Americans are too busy working and consuming to have time for pleasure in their lives. Pornography is something that takes place in the mind, and since almost all of it is variations on a theme, it’s actually quite boring. All it amounts to is a kind of mental “utopia” that never manages to get below the neck. Many years ago Octavio Paz wrote that North Americans were big on pornography because they didn’t really live in their bodies; that in the US, the life of the senses had atrophied.
I remember when I first visited Mexico, in 1979. The most striking thing about crossing the border was the explosion of color. Prior to that, the color range I was used to consisted of varying shades of gray and green. Suddenly, I felt like the victim of a visual assault: Mexico was a riot of color. Houses of deep blue, ochre, salmon, brilliant yellow–what a feast, I remember thinking. True, I had had somewhat similar experiences in San Francisco, New Mexico, and Italy, for example, but this was much more dramatic; it seemed to be a statement about reality, about the nature of things. As I traveled around Mexico, I remember thinking: Which country really has the wealth? What is “wealth,” when you get right down to it? Nearly thirty years later, I live in a Mexican house whose walls are so drenched in color that I see no point in putting up any pictures. The walls themselves are the “art.”
And of course, if there is very little repression of sensuality in Mexico, there is also very little repression of death. Since North Americans don’t really live, in a sensual or erotic way, death is a great source of fear for them, a taboo subject. (The guy who wants the party to go on forever is the one who never had the courage to approach the pretty girls.) In Mexico, on the other hand, death is never very far from one’s consciousness. Pictures of skulls, skeletons, national holidays–all of this seems ever-present, reminding us that you’d better enjoy life while you can, because it’s over pretty quickly, and you are going to be dead for a very long time.
“Make love, not war,” the Austrian psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich, told us, many years ago, in so many words. I guess the old boy knew what he was talking about.
©Morris Berman, 2008
–Philip Larkin, “Faith Healing”
Two years ago an American journalist wrote that “The death instinct hovers over the United States.” I had known this for some time, of course; when you turn yourself into a late-empire killing machine, what other outcome could there be? But the phrase “death instinct,” so stark and Freudian in its implications, really caught my attention. Long before Freud, poets and novelists had written of the intimate connection between love and death, eros and thanatos. Indeed, when the former gets blocked or thwarted, it turns into the latter, its opposite. Check out the body language of Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice, if you don’t believe me.
Since the 1960s, America has been seen as the land of hedonism, the place where “anything goes.” But the truth is that this is a thin veneer placed over a much deeper puritan reality. “Scratch an American,” wrote one astute historian in the late sixties, “and you find a Puritan.” It’s much worse now than it was forty years ago, of course; “political correctness” is nothing if not a puritan movement. Thus I was recently contacted by a German journalist living in Washington, DC, who expressed her horror at a number of current news items. One involved a situation in which the parents of a two-year-old had their child playing in their backyard, in a diaper, and the next-door neighbors called the police to report this case of “indecent exposure.” The police, instead of suggesting that the neighbors check themselves into the nearest mental institution, came to the parents’ house and ordered them to put some clothes on the child.
Another situation she reported to me involved that of a six-year-old boy who wrote a note to a classmate, telling her “I love you.” The little girl showed the note to her parents, who then descended on the school principal, choking with anxiety. The principal could have pointed out how sweet this love note was, how touching. Instead, he inflicted permanent emotional damage on the little boy by suspending him from school for three days. Clearly, hatred of life is a terrifying thing.
The flip side of this, as battalions of sociologists have pointed out, is pornography. By this I don’t mean merely the tons of pictures and videos on the Internet, but, along with the militarization of American life, the sexualization of it. Sex permeates the public sphere in the United States in a way that is so pervasive that it has become part of the air we breathe. Television, advertising, films, you name it–sex is somehow always present. And yet, what does it really come down to? Recent studies of American sexual behavior reveal that actual sexual activity is way down, from years past; Americans are too busy working and consuming to have time for pleasure in their lives. Pornography is something that takes place in the mind, and since almost all of it is variations on a theme, it’s actually quite boring. All it amounts to is a kind of mental “utopia” that never manages to get below the neck. Many years ago Octavio Paz wrote that North Americans were big on pornography because they didn’t really live in their bodies; that in the US, the life of the senses had atrophied.
I remember when I first visited Mexico, in 1979. The most striking thing about crossing the border was the explosion of color. Prior to that, the color range I was used to consisted of varying shades of gray and green. Suddenly, I felt like the victim of a visual assault: Mexico was a riot of color. Houses of deep blue, ochre, salmon, brilliant yellow–what a feast, I remember thinking. True, I had had somewhat similar experiences in San Francisco, New Mexico, and Italy, for example, but this was much more dramatic; it seemed to be a statement about reality, about the nature of things. As I traveled around Mexico, I remember thinking: Which country really has the wealth? What is “wealth,” when you get right down to it? Nearly thirty years later, I live in a Mexican house whose walls are so drenched in color that I see no point in putting up any pictures. The walls themselves are the “art.”
And of course, if there is very little repression of sensuality in Mexico, there is also very little repression of death. Since North Americans don’t really live, in a sensual or erotic way, death is a great source of fear for them, a taboo subject. (The guy who wants the party to go on forever is the one who never had the courage to approach the pretty girls.) In Mexico, on the other hand, death is never very far from one’s consciousness. Pictures of skulls, skeletons, national holidays–all of this seems ever-present, reminding us that you’d better enjoy life while you can, because it’s over pretty quickly, and you are going to be dead for a very long time.
“Make love, not war,” the Austrian psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich, told us, many years ago, in so many words. I guess the old boy knew what he was talking about.
©Morris Berman, 2008
How To Get Out Of Iraq
In the spring of 2006 I received an invitation to attend the launching of the Washington, DC branch of the Independent Institute, a think tank based in Oakland, California. Attendance, it noted, was by invitation only, and there would be five prominent speakers, who would be discussing ways of getting the United States out of Iraq. I didn’t know that much about the Independent Institute, save that it counted among its directors Ivan Eland, who had written what was to my mind an incisive analysis of American imperial history, The Empire has No Clothes. That I got invited at all was something I never quite figured out, but why quarrel with the gods, I thought. I put on a suit and tie and took the Metro downtown.
The event was on a weekend afternoon, if I remember correctly. It was, indeed, a select audience, because the symposium was held in a room with a seating capacity of at most sixty or seventy people. C-SPAN was there to film it for its “BookTV” series; Daniel Ellsberg, who lives in California, came in for the event. Speakers included Ivan Eland, Gen. William Odum (retired), historian-journalist Gareth Porter, and two others whose names escape me now. Somebody from the Independent Institute gave a brief introduction, and then the speakers launched into their talks.
What then unrolled was an object lesson in irony. Only about half the people in the audience bothered to listen to what was going on. Indeed, it seemed like every thirty seconds someone’s cell phone went off, and the person would answer their phone, and then take the call, walking out of the room as they did so (at least they had the decency to leave). This went on almost constantly. The woman on my left, about thirty years of age with a distinctly teenage kind of energy to her, paid no attention to any of the speakers; for the entire length of the conference, she sat there staring at her cell phone, text-messaging other people. It never occurred to any of these cell phone addicts–and I’m referring to at least thirty-five individuals–that inasmuch as they had been invited to a private event, the least they could do was respect it by actually being present at it. That is to say, to turn off their phones and sit for the allotted hour or so and listen to what the speakers were saying. No: these people were so “important” that it was perfectly OK to them to ignore the entire meeting and respond to these “urgent” messages. (It’s amazing how many messages become “urgent” when one has a cell phone.) To hell with everybody else, is the idea here; my personal life comes first.
Before we ask ourselves how the US might get out of Iraq, we might ask ourselves how it got there in the first place. And what immediately comes to mind, for me at least, is hubris. America, and America alone, will command the space, and the governments, of other nations, and tell them how they are going to think and live. A huge chunk of this nation–probably, the vast majority–regards this as a perfectly sensible and legitimate foreign policy. But suppose the shoe were on the other foot, and there were a nation in the world more powerful than us, and it decided that it didn’t like our government and our president (hard to imagine, I know) and would, as a result, institute a “regime change.” So it bombed and invaded us, took us over, murdered several hundred thousand civilians, removed our leaders from power, and set up a government whose actions it would personally direct. This is completely acceptable to the American people when the US is doing it to another nation; but these very same people would (rightly) react with horrified indignation if another nation would attempt to do anything even vaguely similar to us (assuming that there were a nation in the world capable of doing so). Hubris means I Come First, I’ll Do What I Want, I’ll act however I want in your space, and if you don’t like it, too bad for you.
This issue of space is an important one. Western cultures believe, following Euclid and Newton, that all space is functionally equivalent: just one big box, so to speak. But as other cultures know, this is demonstrably incorrect: the space of a subway car, or a university classroom, or a church, for example, are qualitatively very different, sequentially demonstrating an increasing amount of coherence and purpose. (We are in fact aware of this when we speak of the ambience of a restaurant, as restaurant reviews often do. All spaces are not equivalent, quite obviously.) Pure Newtonian space has no inherent meaning, and in that sense one might as well impose one’s will on it, for it is merely a receptacle. But sacred space–to take the other extreme–is soaking in meaning, and acting in a highly individualistic manner in such a context would not be appropriate. The space of a symposium or conference is somewhere in between, like a university classroom; but it surely has enough meaning imbued in it that to take it over for one’s own purposes would be to do violence to it, in effect. To show the space respect is to play by its rules, not your own. But just the reverse was happening in the space of this gathering in downtown Washington, and this raises the question of the mental space of the participants–their values (conscious or unconscious) and way of conducting themselves.
What I am arguing, then, is that the problem of the US in Iraq showed up, in microcosm, in the behavior of much of the audience at the Independent Institute’s symposium on how to get out of Iraq. When you think about it, this behavior was, socially speaking, idiotic (in ancient Greece, an “idiot” was a person who did not know how to relate to the larger society), and what these attendees were doing amounted to a form of social violence. They came to a symposium on how to get out of Iraq, and then on an individual level displayed the identical attitude of the American government toward Iraq: I Come First, I’ll Do What I Want, I’ll act however I want in your space, and if you don’t like it, too bad for you. I’m guessing that almost all of the audience was opposed to American imperial policy in the Middle East; but if your psyche is ultimately the same as that of the president’s in terms of one’s individual right to the space of others, what difference does it make?
The truth is that macro-aggression is not really possible without a cultural basis of micro-aggression. For America to stop being an imperial power, arrogantly imposing (or attempting to impose) its will on the rest of the world, its individual citizens have to stop being mini-imperialists; they would have to respect the space of other people. But this is not very likely to happen, because it–i.e., nonrespect, in the form of extreme individualism–is the very fabric of American social life, and thus, in effect, invisible. This conforms very well to Marshall McLuhan’s famous quip, that the last thing a fish is aware of in its environment is water. Thus for me to have suggested to the woman on my left, for example, that coming to the symposium only to do e-mail for the entire length of the conference was rude, would have left her not only enraged, but genuinely bewildered: What could I possibly mean by that, since “surely” she has every right to do whatever she wants, regardless of the context–right? Obviously, if everybody’s behavior is narcissistic and arrogant, then narcissism and arrogance become “normal”.
So there we all were, at a symposium to explore how to stop being imperialists, when the cause of it all was literally right under our noses. (As one sociologist famously remarked, “There is more sociology in a department of sociology than there is in the rest of the world.”) Instead of discussing military strategy, Shiites vs. Sunnis, the geopolitics of the Middle East, etc. etc., we might have done better to have turned the analytical lens back onto ourselves, and just observed what “normal” American (i.e., US) behavior amounts to. Then the path to getting out of Iraq, and to not creating future Iraqs, no longer seems obscure: The United States will stop being the United States when Americans stop being Americans. What are the chances, do you think?
©Morris Berman, 2008
The event was on a weekend afternoon, if I remember correctly. It was, indeed, a select audience, because the symposium was held in a room with a seating capacity of at most sixty or seventy people. C-SPAN was there to film it for its “BookTV” series; Daniel Ellsberg, who lives in California, came in for the event. Speakers included Ivan Eland, Gen. William Odum (retired), historian-journalist Gareth Porter, and two others whose names escape me now. Somebody from the Independent Institute gave a brief introduction, and then the speakers launched into their talks.
What then unrolled was an object lesson in irony. Only about half the people in the audience bothered to listen to what was going on. Indeed, it seemed like every thirty seconds someone’s cell phone went off, and the person would answer their phone, and then take the call, walking out of the room as they did so (at least they had the decency to leave). This went on almost constantly. The woman on my left, about thirty years of age with a distinctly teenage kind of energy to her, paid no attention to any of the speakers; for the entire length of the conference, she sat there staring at her cell phone, text-messaging other people. It never occurred to any of these cell phone addicts–and I’m referring to at least thirty-five individuals–that inasmuch as they had been invited to a private event, the least they could do was respect it by actually being present at it. That is to say, to turn off their phones and sit for the allotted hour or so and listen to what the speakers were saying. No: these people were so “important” that it was perfectly OK to them to ignore the entire meeting and respond to these “urgent” messages. (It’s amazing how many messages become “urgent” when one has a cell phone.) To hell with everybody else, is the idea here; my personal life comes first.
Before we ask ourselves how the US might get out of Iraq, we might ask ourselves how it got there in the first place. And what immediately comes to mind, for me at least, is hubris. America, and America alone, will command the space, and the governments, of other nations, and tell them how they are going to think and live. A huge chunk of this nation–probably, the vast majority–regards this as a perfectly sensible and legitimate foreign policy. But suppose the shoe were on the other foot, and there were a nation in the world more powerful than us, and it decided that it didn’t like our government and our president (hard to imagine, I know) and would, as a result, institute a “regime change.” So it bombed and invaded us, took us over, murdered several hundred thousand civilians, removed our leaders from power, and set up a government whose actions it would personally direct. This is completely acceptable to the American people when the US is doing it to another nation; but these very same people would (rightly) react with horrified indignation if another nation would attempt to do anything even vaguely similar to us (assuming that there were a nation in the world capable of doing so). Hubris means I Come First, I’ll Do What I Want, I’ll act however I want in your space, and if you don’t like it, too bad for you.
This issue of space is an important one. Western cultures believe, following Euclid and Newton, that all space is functionally equivalent: just one big box, so to speak. But as other cultures know, this is demonstrably incorrect: the space of a subway car, or a university classroom, or a church, for example, are qualitatively very different, sequentially demonstrating an increasing amount of coherence and purpose. (We are in fact aware of this when we speak of the ambience of a restaurant, as restaurant reviews often do. All spaces are not equivalent, quite obviously.) Pure Newtonian space has no inherent meaning, and in that sense one might as well impose one’s will on it, for it is merely a receptacle. But sacred space–to take the other extreme–is soaking in meaning, and acting in a highly individualistic manner in such a context would not be appropriate. The space of a symposium or conference is somewhere in between, like a university classroom; but it surely has enough meaning imbued in it that to take it over for one’s own purposes would be to do violence to it, in effect. To show the space respect is to play by its rules, not your own. But just the reverse was happening in the space of this gathering in downtown Washington, and this raises the question of the mental space of the participants–their values (conscious or unconscious) and way of conducting themselves.
What I am arguing, then, is that the problem of the US in Iraq showed up, in microcosm, in the behavior of much of the audience at the Independent Institute’s symposium on how to get out of Iraq. When you think about it, this behavior was, socially speaking, idiotic (in ancient Greece, an “idiot” was a person who did not know how to relate to the larger society), and what these attendees were doing amounted to a form of social violence. They came to a symposium on how to get out of Iraq, and then on an individual level displayed the identical attitude of the American government toward Iraq: I Come First, I’ll Do What I Want, I’ll act however I want in your space, and if you don’t like it, too bad for you. I’m guessing that almost all of the audience was opposed to American imperial policy in the Middle East; but if your psyche is ultimately the same as that of the president’s in terms of one’s individual right to the space of others, what difference does it make?
The truth is that macro-aggression is not really possible without a cultural basis of micro-aggression. For America to stop being an imperial power, arrogantly imposing (or attempting to impose) its will on the rest of the world, its individual citizens have to stop being mini-imperialists; they would have to respect the space of other people. But this is not very likely to happen, because it–i.e., nonrespect, in the form of extreme individualism–is the very fabric of American social life, and thus, in effect, invisible. This conforms very well to Marshall McLuhan’s famous quip, that the last thing a fish is aware of in its environment is water. Thus for me to have suggested to the woman on my left, for example, that coming to the symposium only to do e-mail for the entire length of the conference was rude, would have left her not only enraged, but genuinely bewildered: What could I possibly mean by that, since “surely” she has every right to do whatever she wants, regardless of the context–right? Obviously, if everybody’s behavior is narcissistic and arrogant, then narcissism and arrogance become “normal”.
So there we all were, at a symposium to explore how to stop being imperialists, when the cause of it all was literally right under our noses. (As one sociologist famously remarked, “There is more sociology in a department of sociology than there is in the rest of the world.”) Instead of discussing military strategy, Shiites vs. Sunnis, the geopolitics of the Middle East, etc. etc., we might have done better to have turned the analytical lens back onto ourselves, and just observed what “normal” American (i.e., US) behavior amounts to. Then the path to getting out of Iraq, and to not creating future Iraqs, no longer seems obscure: The United States will stop being the United States when Americans stop being Americans. What are the chances, do you think?
©Morris Berman, 2008
Ik Is Us: The Every-Man-for-Himself Society
Although I was born in America, I am only first generation, my family having emigrated from eastern Europe in 1920. As a child, I was raised in what might be called a European socialist ethic: you help other people. As a result, I lived, in the United States, in a state of perpetual culture shock for nearly six decades. As lawyer "Jackie Chiles" says in the final episode of the famous sit-com, Seinfeld, "You don’t have to help anybody! That’s what this country’s all about!"
Not helping other people is systemic in the United States; it’s as though it were woven into the very DNA of American citizens. It’s not a question of immorality as much as amorality: we aren’t raised with an ideology, or even a consciousness, in which the other person counts. I remember, when I was fifteen years old, some boy in my school whom I knew only vaguely–his name was Tom –was walking around on crutches after knee surgery. Much to my surprise, he asked me if I would carry his books for him from his home room to his first class, as he couldn’t manage to do this while on crutches. I did it for two weeks, until he was able to do it himself, and didn’t think twice about it. About a week into this routine, Tom’s mother called mine. "You know," she said, "Tom asked about a dozen students, including close friends of his, and they all said that they couldn’t do it because they didn’t want to be late for their first class. In my opinion, your son is a saint." "My son is not a saint," my mother fairly snorted, stating the obvious; "he’s just doing what he’s supposed to be doing."
Fast-forward forty-five years, and now I have had knee surgery and am returning home from the hospital on crutches. As I approach the side door of my building, someone who also lives in the building is coming down the walk, busily talking on his cell phone. He looks at me briefly, then takes out his plastic pass key, swipes it in the little magnetic coding box, opens the door and goes in. The door shuts behind him; I’m standing outside of it, now fumbling in my wallet to find my own plastic entry card. Suddenly, the man–apparently seized by a rare moment of human fellow-feeling–pushes the door open from the inside. He doesn’t come out and hold it open for me, mind you; he just pushes it open, so I can sort of squeeze myself into the doorway on my crutches. He then hurries down the hall to the elevator, leaving me in the dust, as it were. Not a word is exchanged.
A few months later–the end of August 2005, to be more precise–I have an appointment at the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore, and need to check out the men’s room before I take the elevator upstairs. I walk in on a scene in which a man has collapsed on the floor, and someone else is trying to get him up on his feet. "Hold on," I say; "I’ll go get help." The first person I see outside the men’s room, about six feet away, is a police officer sitting on a bench. "Can you help?" I ask him; "some guy just collapsed on the floor of the bathroom." "I don’t work here," he replies; "go to the In-patient Desk." Given the emergency nature of the situation, I don’t bother to argue with him about the irrelevance of his nonemployment for helping another human being, but take off for the In-patient Desk. "Can you help?" I ask the woman at the desk; "a man has collapsed on the floor of the bathroom down the hall." "You’ll have to talk to Security, over there," she gestures. I run over to the Security officer, repeat the story for the third time. "I’ll call the Fire Department," he says. What relevance the Fire Department has to somebody passing out in the bathroom I have no idea, but I just say, "It’s this way." He is already walking ahead of me, and when he reaches the men’s room, he keeps on going. "Here!" I shout; "it’s right here." He just keeps walking down the hall. I figure the guy is probably dead by now anyway.
A few days later, hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. As we all know, the response of the federal government was very slow: for several days, people were left to fend for themselves, and vast numbers were without food or water. During this time, a friend of mine, a lawyer, sent me an online video that was made by MSNBC the day after Katrina hit the city, showing people looting a Wal-Mart store. This in itself was not that shocking; basically, it’s what I and probably a lot of other Americans would expect. What was impressive was the fact that the police were also there, wheeling shopping carts around and looting right along with the looters. When Martin Savidge of NBC News asked one policewoman what she was doing, she replied, "Jus’ doin’ mah job." Apparently, stealing DVD players while the townspeople were drowning was not a problem for New Orleans’ Finest.
Is the reader beginning to notice a pattern here? In one form or another, this is America in microcosm, and it is disturbingly reminiscent of the worldview of the Ik of Uganda as described by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull in The Mountain People. This tribe had been reduced to a condition of savage self-interest due to economic hardship. Turnbull describes how, when a member of the tribe died, neighbors (as well as children and siblings) would fight over the person's few belongings, and then abandon the corpse. Turnbull comments that in this system of mutual exploitation, affection and trust were actually dysfunctional. "Does that sound so very different from our own society?" he asks at the end of the book. These words were written in 1972; one can only wonder what Turnbull would have thought of American life thirty-three years later, were he still alive. What, after all, can be the fate or future of a country in which people on crutches constitute an annoying distraction; in which the hospital staff response to a man collapsing on the floor is, "It’s not my problem"; and in which the police join looters in their looting while all around them people are dying by the thousands?
Any ideas?
©Morris Berman, 2007
Not helping other people is systemic in the United States; it’s as though it were woven into the very DNA of American citizens. It’s not a question of immorality as much as amorality: we aren’t raised with an ideology, or even a consciousness, in which the other person counts. I remember, when I was fifteen years old, some boy in my school whom I knew only vaguely–his name was Tom –was walking around on crutches after knee surgery. Much to my surprise, he asked me if I would carry his books for him from his home room to his first class, as he couldn’t manage to do this while on crutches. I did it for two weeks, until he was able to do it himself, and didn’t think twice about it. About a week into this routine, Tom’s mother called mine. "You know," she said, "Tom asked about a dozen students, including close friends of his, and they all said that they couldn’t do it because they didn’t want to be late for their first class. In my opinion, your son is a saint." "My son is not a saint," my mother fairly snorted, stating the obvious; "he’s just doing what he’s supposed to be doing."
Fast-forward forty-five years, and now I have had knee surgery and am returning home from the hospital on crutches. As I approach the side door of my building, someone who also lives in the building is coming down the walk, busily talking on his cell phone. He looks at me briefly, then takes out his plastic pass key, swipes it in the little magnetic coding box, opens the door and goes in. The door shuts behind him; I’m standing outside of it, now fumbling in my wallet to find my own plastic entry card. Suddenly, the man–apparently seized by a rare moment of human fellow-feeling–pushes the door open from the inside. He doesn’t come out and hold it open for me, mind you; he just pushes it open, so I can sort of squeeze myself into the doorway on my crutches. He then hurries down the hall to the elevator, leaving me in the dust, as it were. Not a word is exchanged.
A few months later–the end of August 2005, to be more precise–I have an appointment at the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore, and need to check out the men’s room before I take the elevator upstairs. I walk in on a scene in which a man has collapsed on the floor, and someone else is trying to get him up on his feet. "Hold on," I say; "I’ll go get help." The first person I see outside the men’s room, about six feet away, is a police officer sitting on a bench. "Can you help?" I ask him; "some guy just collapsed on the floor of the bathroom." "I don’t work here," he replies; "go to the In-patient Desk." Given the emergency nature of the situation, I don’t bother to argue with him about the irrelevance of his nonemployment for helping another human being, but take off for the In-patient Desk. "Can you help?" I ask the woman at the desk; "a man has collapsed on the floor of the bathroom down the hall." "You’ll have to talk to Security, over there," she gestures. I run over to the Security officer, repeat the story for the third time. "I’ll call the Fire Department," he says. What relevance the Fire Department has to somebody passing out in the bathroom I have no idea, but I just say, "It’s this way." He is already walking ahead of me, and when he reaches the men’s room, he keeps on going. "Here!" I shout; "it’s right here." He just keeps walking down the hall. I figure the guy is probably dead by now anyway.
A few days later, hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. As we all know, the response of the federal government was very slow: for several days, people were left to fend for themselves, and vast numbers were without food or water. During this time, a friend of mine, a lawyer, sent me an online video that was made by MSNBC the day after Katrina hit the city, showing people looting a Wal-Mart store. This in itself was not that shocking; basically, it’s what I and probably a lot of other Americans would expect. What was impressive was the fact that the police were also there, wheeling shopping carts around and looting right along with the looters. When Martin Savidge of NBC News asked one policewoman what she was doing, she replied, "Jus’ doin’ mah job." Apparently, stealing DVD players while the townspeople were drowning was not a problem for New Orleans’ Finest.
Is the reader beginning to notice a pattern here? In one form or another, this is America in microcosm, and it is disturbingly reminiscent of the worldview of the Ik of Uganda as described by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull in The Mountain People. This tribe had been reduced to a condition of savage self-interest due to economic hardship. Turnbull describes how, when a member of the tribe died, neighbors (as well as children and siblings) would fight over the person's few belongings, and then abandon the corpse. Turnbull comments that in this system of mutual exploitation, affection and trust were actually dysfunctional. "Does that sound so very different from our own society?" he asks at the end of the book. These words were written in 1972; one can only wonder what Turnbull would have thought of American life thirty-three years later, were he still alive. What, after all, can be the fate or future of a country in which people on crutches constitute an annoying distraction; in which the hospital staff response to a man collapsing on the floor is, "It’s not my problem"; and in which the police join looters in their looting while all around them people are dying by the thousands?
Any ideas?
©Morris Berman, 2007
Author's Apology
Dear Friends,
Some of you have been reminding me that I've been kind of slow in posting material, and I have to plead guilty on this. I really have no excuse, since I have a few articles in my files that I should have posted a while back. It turns out that I'm the "Columnista Internacional" for "Parteaguas," the quarterly journal of the Instituto Cultural de Aguascalientes, here in Mexico. I write on various aspects of "this American life," and they translate my essays into Spanish. So let me now post three of those, which I hope you'll enjoy, and please accept my sincere apologies for having not done so sooner.
All the best to all my readers-
mb
Some of you have been reminding me that I've been kind of slow in posting material, and I have to plead guilty on this. I really have no excuse, since I have a few articles in my files that I should have posted a while back. It turns out that I'm the "Columnista Internacional" for "Parteaguas," the quarterly journal of the Instituto Cultural de Aguascalientes, here in Mexico. I write on various aspects of "this American life," and they translate my essays into Spanish. So let me now post three of those, which I hope you'll enjoy, and please accept my sincere apologies for having not done so sooner.
All the best to all my readers-
mb
February 02, 2008
The Purpose of a Humanities Education
Dear Friends:
I am currently in the process of being appointed Visiting Professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City campus, Dept. of Humanities; in fact, my first seminar for the humanities faculty is on February 6. Since colleagues have warned me that I may be asked to do some media interviews regarding the "purpose of a humanities education," I thought I should write something up with a view to talking points on the subject, so that I might have something coherent to say. The essay below (for better or worse) is what I came up with.--mb
"No people can be both ignorant and free"–Thomas Jefferson
"If ignorance were bliss, Americans would be ecstatic"–US bumper sticker
Before we can ask what the purpose of the humanities is, perhaps we should ask what the purpose of a university is, or even what the purpose of a nation is.
If the purpose is money and power, then the obvious model is the United States. At least, in the short run. Because in the long run, this has not worked out very well for the US. As I have argued elsewhere, after 230 years the country seems to be on its last legs. Economically, the US is in deep trouble, with some experts predicting a Depression-style crash within ten to fifteen years. In terms of power, it seems clear enough that the US is rapidly losing influence around the world, with the European Union and China set to replace it in its hegemonic role. A major reason for this decline is that the center of the US value system is money, power, and technology. Not that there is anything wrong with these things, so long as they constitute means and not ends. But in the US, they became ends, purposes in and of themselves; which meant that finally, the country had no purpose at all–it became spiritually bankrupt. While it is by now too late for the United States to reverse course, I would personally like to see Mexico (and the rest of the world) avoid this unhappy fate. Not unrelated to this is the fact that most US universities lost their purpose as well, and I am thus hoping that Mexican universities will rethink their admiration for their US counterparts. Consider the following facts:
1. In 1965, something like 75% of the freshman class in the US said that they were in college "to find a meaningful philosophy of life." Forty years later (even less), 75% said their goal was to become rich.
2. In the 18-24 age group in the US, 87% can’t locate Iraq or Iran on a world map, and 11% can’t locate the US(!).
3. During 2003-4, 20% of US undergraduates majored in business, whereas 1.6% majored in English, and 1.3% in history.
4. 20% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, and an additional 9% say they don’t know which revolves around which.
5. In 1982, 56.9% of Americans read a work of creative literature during the previous twelve months. This dropped to 46.7% in 2002–i.e. a loss of 10% in twenty years.
6. Newspapers continue to go out of business in the US for lack of readership, and book sales to stagnate. There has even been some discussion in the US as of late as to whether reading will become a kind of "quaint hobby" in the future.
7. Educational researchers in the US have recently identified a phenomenon known as "negative learning". A University of Connecticut survey of 2005 revealed that at sixteen prestigious universities, including Yale, Chicago, Berkeley, and MIT, the seniors knew less about American history, government, foreign relations, and the economy than the freshmen did.
8. The current president of the United States, who holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, is notoriously uncurious about the world and has a difficult time speaking correct English.
What enabled all of this to happen? Three factors come to mind:
1. Increasingly, after World War II, a college education in the US became little more than preparation for a job. "Learning for learning’s sake" came to be regarded a kind of luxury.
2. American universities adopted the model of the corporation, and teaching was in turn modeled on the corporate-client relationship: the professor is there as a "provider" of a "commodity," which the students "purchase" from the institution. Once education became commodified in this way, respect for it basically evaporated. It became purely instrumental, rather than being seen as a way of life, or a way of deepening one’s understanding of the world and of oneself.
3. As the humanities lost respect, many teachers of the humanities lost respect for their own discipline. By the 1970s, a curious phenomenon known as "postmodernism" emerged, in which professors not only abandoned the search for truth, but began to argue that it didn’t even exist. This was a formula for academic irrelevance, if not suicide.
The humanities exist to ask–and answer–the question, What are we living for?, or What is the meaning of human life? If, as in the United States, the Mexican university answer is going to be the US national-corporate one, i.e., To make money, or, To have more technological gadgets, then education and the nation have no real future. For only the humanities can address these questions in a nontrivial way. If Mexico is to have a future, its universities are going to have to make the humanities central to the education of their students. Sound far-fetched? No need to take my word for it; for the counterexample, just–look north.
I am currently in the process of being appointed Visiting Professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City campus, Dept. of Humanities; in fact, my first seminar for the humanities faculty is on February 6. Since colleagues have warned me that I may be asked to do some media interviews regarding the "purpose of a humanities education," I thought I should write something up with a view to talking points on the subject, so that I might have something coherent to say. The essay below (for better or worse) is what I came up with.--mb
"No people can be both ignorant and free"–Thomas Jefferson
"If ignorance were bliss, Americans would be ecstatic"–US bumper sticker
Before we can ask what the purpose of the humanities is, perhaps we should ask what the purpose of a university is, or even what the purpose of a nation is.
If the purpose is money and power, then the obvious model is the United States. At least, in the short run. Because in the long run, this has not worked out very well for the US. As I have argued elsewhere, after 230 years the country seems to be on its last legs. Economically, the US is in deep trouble, with some experts predicting a Depression-style crash within ten to fifteen years. In terms of power, it seems clear enough that the US is rapidly losing influence around the world, with the European Union and China set to replace it in its hegemonic role. A major reason for this decline is that the center of the US value system is money, power, and technology. Not that there is anything wrong with these things, so long as they constitute means and not ends. But in the US, they became ends, purposes in and of themselves; which meant that finally, the country had no purpose at all–it became spiritually bankrupt. While it is by now too late for the United States to reverse course, I would personally like to see Mexico (and the rest of the world) avoid this unhappy fate. Not unrelated to this is the fact that most US universities lost their purpose as well, and I am thus hoping that Mexican universities will rethink their admiration for their US counterparts. Consider the following facts:
1. In 1965, something like 75% of the freshman class in the US said that they were in college "to find a meaningful philosophy of life." Forty years later (even less), 75% said their goal was to become rich.
2. In the 18-24 age group in the US, 87% can’t locate Iraq or Iran on a world map, and 11% can’t locate the US(!).
3. During 2003-4, 20% of US undergraduates majored in business, whereas 1.6% majored in English, and 1.3% in history.
4. 20% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, and an additional 9% say they don’t know which revolves around which.
5. In 1982, 56.9% of Americans read a work of creative literature during the previous twelve months. This dropped to 46.7% in 2002–i.e. a loss of 10% in twenty years.
6. Newspapers continue to go out of business in the US for lack of readership, and book sales to stagnate. There has even been some discussion in the US as of late as to whether reading will become a kind of "quaint hobby" in the future.
7. Educational researchers in the US have recently identified a phenomenon known as "negative learning". A University of Connecticut survey of 2005 revealed that at sixteen prestigious universities, including Yale, Chicago, Berkeley, and MIT, the seniors knew less about American history, government, foreign relations, and the economy than the freshmen did.
8. The current president of the United States, who holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, is notoriously uncurious about the world and has a difficult time speaking correct English.
What enabled all of this to happen? Three factors come to mind:
1. Increasingly, after World War II, a college education in the US became little more than preparation for a job. "Learning for learning’s sake" came to be regarded a kind of luxury.
2. American universities adopted the model of the corporation, and teaching was in turn modeled on the corporate-client relationship: the professor is there as a "provider" of a "commodity," which the students "purchase" from the institution. Once education became commodified in this way, respect for it basically evaporated. It became purely instrumental, rather than being seen as a way of life, or a way of deepening one’s understanding of the world and of oneself.
3. As the humanities lost respect, many teachers of the humanities lost respect for their own discipline. By the 1970s, a curious phenomenon known as "postmodernism" emerged, in which professors not only abandoned the search for truth, but began to argue that it didn’t even exist. This was a formula for academic irrelevance, if not suicide.
The humanities exist to ask–and answer–the question, What are we living for?, or What is the meaning of human life? If, as in the United States, the Mexican university answer is going to be the US national-corporate one, i.e., To make money, or, To have more technological gadgets, then education and the nation have no real future. For only the humanities can address these questions in a nontrivial way. If Mexico is to have a future, its universities are going to have to make the humanities central to the education of their students. Sound far-fetched? No need to take my word for it; for the counterexample, just–look north.
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