August 04, 2012
Sociopath's Delight
OK, let's continue this discussion with Comment No. 1, having exhausted our 200 limit on the last post. Ball's in yr court, amigos...
July 24, 2012
Sociopaths Rule
Sociopaths Rule: A Review of Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?, by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher (2011)
At the outset let me say that reviewing this film was, for me, a bit of an odd assignment. I love this film. I think it’s punchy and provocative, and that it speaks with an authentic voice. I think it’s important to get it into every Multiplex in the land, because the issues it raises are basic, controversial, and need to get discussed in every home, luncheonette, drug store, firehouse, and community college in the nation. A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen. The odd part of it, for me, was (since I’m not really a “progressive” or a socialist) that I found myself in serious disagreement with much of it. But the power of the film is its enormous potential to generate substantive dialogue, and this is the real source of my admiration of it.
Let me start with the good stuff, as it were. Beyond generating dialogue, Heist provides an alternative narrative to what’s been going on in this country since 1981. “Reaganomics,” or what we now call “neo-liberalism,” is the philosophy that economic growth is the answer to all our problems, because as the rich make more money, some of that will supposedly “trickle down” to the rest of us. This has been the dominant narrative in this country for the last thirty years, and what Heist clearly demonstrates is that it’s nothing more than pure kaka. What actually happened under this narrative was that wealth got transferred upward; that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer; that virtually nothing “trickled down”; that unions were busted, public services gutted, American manufacturing crippled, the media collapsed into six major corporations and turned into corporate propaganda mouthpieces, and so on—the America we have today, in other words, in which 1 out of every 5 of us is without work and without prospect of same for at least a decade, and in which 2 out of every 3 of us lives from paycheck to paycheck, hoping that some major accident won’t occur in our lives and put us underwater for good.
Heist is thus an exercise in counter-brainwashing: Reagan and his ilk, the Powell Memorandum and the so-called think tanks (read: propaganda machines) of the political right (American Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, etc.) all sold us a bill of goods, stole the American Dream out from under us, and we need to recognize that we’ve been economically and intellectually fleeced. Unless we can debunk the dominant narrative, and realize what really went down since 1981, we will not be able to take back the American Dream—which Causey and Goldmacher define as everyone getting a fair share of the economic pie.
The film also demonstrates that there really isn’t much of a difference between Democrats and Republicans on this score; all appearances to the contrary, Wall Street really is the government, and both parties understand this. Thus Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers worked in the Clinton administration; Clinton destroyed the welfare system; the gap between rich and poor widened during his presidency; and legislation making possible the whole system of CDO’s , credit-default swaps and the like—the further deregulation of the banking industry—occurred on his watch as well. As Gore Vidal wryly put it, the American political system consists of one political party with two right wings.
Finally, without being explicit, the film does suggest that there is something mentally unbalanced, if not downright sociopathic, about the American ruling class. The top 1% could care less about society at large, is the impression we get from this documentary; the only thing on their minds is profit. Recent years have seen the publication of a fair number of articles claiming that psychological studies of such people show that they have very little capacity for empathy, along with very high dopamine levels in the brain, which also depresses empathy and keeps them hyped up, always “on the go.” These people cannot grasp, as former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall says at one point in the movie, that taxes are the price of civilization; that every society must have civil institutions; and that the ideology of every man for himself is the antithesis of civilization—the ideology of lunatics, if I may embellish on his remarks.
So why am I having problems with this? It all seems reasonable enough, especially if you believe that if we don’t undertake a serious redistribution of wealth, we are finished as a society. Let me say a few words about Heist, then, by way of critique.
1. Greed, and the free-market ideology, were hardly born in 1981. In this sense, the film lacks a genuine (which is to say, long-range) historical perspective. Greed showed up on the American continent in the late sixteenth century, when what would later become the United States started to be colonized by a particularly aggressive and entrepreneurial segment of the English middle class. Louis Hartz makes this point in his classic work, The American Liberal Tradition (1955), when he says that America is a “fragment society,” i.e. one that took a particular strand from the mother country—in this case the mentality of hustling, of go-getting, of unlimited economic expansion—and made it into the whole of the new country. One might argue that Reagan represented a “quantum leap” in this ideology, but he hardly invented it; from Day One, it is what America has been about. Credit-default swaps are merely the inevitable culmination of a process that has been going on for more than four hundred years.
2. How deliberate is the so-called conspiracy against the poor and the middle class on the part of the rich and big business? Two points here:
a) These folks really do believe what they are saying. I’m absolutely convinced of that. In other words, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, they were and are convinced (conveniently for them, of course) that if they could become rich with no holds barred, everyone would be better off. This is not just a pose; they really did, and do, believe this. The goal was not to screw the working class, in other words; it was to create a template for even greater levels of business profit and expansion. “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA” rings true for them; they probably sew it on their pillows as a motto. Like the Tea Party, the rich believe that it is truly evil to limit the amount of wealth any one individual can accumulate, and that the government must not be allowed to get in the way of that. “It’s what made America great, etc.” This may not make the final result of what they are doing any different than if there were a genuine conspiracy afoot, but I do think we need to realize that these convictions are held as deeply by this class as are the semi-socialist convictions of the political left.
b) Ironically enough, the “oppressed” 99% that the Occupy Wall Street movement claimed to represent may not be that far from the ideology of the upper 1%. There has been much discussion, on the part of sociologists, as to why socialism never managed to take root in the United States, and the general consensus boils down to a remark once made by John Steinbeck: “In the U.S., the poor regard themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In ideological terms, the only difference between rich and poor in this country is that the latter don’t have any money. The interest of the poor or the middle class has not been to have the sort of civilization Robert Crandall talks about, or (also interviewed in the movie) Bernie Sanders does, which would include concern for the environment, the welfare of society, the fairness of our institutions, and so on—not at all. Their goal has been, since the late sixteenth century, to get into that upper 1%. When Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt in 1922, a biting satire of the hustling way of life, the reaction to the book on the part of Americans was not to smirk at George Babbitt, but to speculate on how they might become George Babbitt. There really are limits to the argument that a small cabal of the wealthy and powerful “did this” to us—the rape theory of American history, one might call it. It’s more likely that the process was one of consensual sex. It is hardly an accident that Mr. Reagan won the election in 1980 by one of the biggest landslides in American history, or that every year, when polls are taken of the “who’s-your-favorite-president” variety, Mr. Reagan comes out on top or close to it. Consider also the unrelenting popularity—for decades now—of a book such as Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. If Alan Greenspan was her protégé, so are we all; we all swim in the stagnant pool of her ideological pathology.
3. Like Occupy Wall Street, the film insists that we must “take back” the American Dream. Like OWS, it never seems to grasp the fact that rather than recovering or restoring the A.D., we need to abolish it. The A.D. is part of the American frontier mentality, coupled with the mythology of extreme individualism, and is in fact based on the idea of infinity: there can and should be no end to economic and technological expansion. Unfortunately for that hopelessly neurotic vision, we are fast running out of resources; the planet cannot support the A.D. extended to every American, let alone every person on the planet. In fact, it was once calculated that for everyone on the planet to have a “modest” middle-class American life, we would need the resources of six Earths. This is why socialism, or spreading the A.D. around more fairly, is not an adequate response to capitalism, because it too is based on the notions of “growth” and “progress,” and those notions are fast becoming obsolete. The real shift required is not to (let’s say) a Scandanavian-style economy, but to a steady-state one: no growth, and not profit-oriented. And if the left hates this, as I’m sure they do: well hard cheese, folks, because in thirty to forty years we are going to be forced into this, when petroleum runs out and the dream of unlimited energy turns into the nightmare of scarcity. To socialists and capitalists alike, to Paul Krugman and Robert Reich and every other so-called liberal, I can only say this: permanent growth means permanent crisis. It’s time to start equating this type of growth with cancer.
4. Which means to me that significant historical change will come to America as “capitalism hits the fan,” to quote Richard Wolff, and it will obviously involve more than just the United States. Heist puts a lot of stock in Occupy Wall Street and grass-roots organizing, which gives it (in my view) a rather dated flavor. OWS was a colossal flop; it didn’t amount to much of anything, when the dust settled; it just came and went, like yet one more American fad, and the question we have to ask is Why? Again, I refer you to the comment of John Steinbeck, and the discussion in 2(b), above; but beyond that, let me make two crucial points here:
First, when Robert Crandall argues that the ideology of every man for himself is the antithesis of civilization, we need to recognize—again—that extreme individualism is literally the core of American civilization, and thus that we never really constituted much of a civilization. We do not operate out of a moral center, in the U.S.; “more” is hardly a reasonable philosophy of life, and that is pretty much what we’ve been about. Don’t kid yourself: Miles Davis and Melville and J.D. Salinger and Thomas Cole arose in spite of the American way of life, not because of it, and Georges Clemenceau was on the mark when he commented that America was “the only nation that went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening phase of civilization.” I mean, let’s call a spade a spade here: Heist’s idea of change, as with OWS’ idea, is purely economic in nature; it’s not really about a truly different kind of culture. Nor can we expect such a shift, after four hundred years of doing just one thing. Over and over again, I heard OWS tell us that we needed to cut the pie up in a fairer way. Not once did I hear them say that the problem was the pie itself; that it was, in the final analysis, rotten.
Second, the movie tells us that Americans have the drive and initiative to change things, to “take back” our country (whatever that means), and to challenge the power elite. I’m not sure Frances and Don are living on the same planet I am, if I can level with you here. Even a casual observation of Americans, and of American behavior, will tell you that we have no such drive and initiative—we seem exhausted, spiritually spent—and truth be told, we are not very bright, as a people. I remember marching against the invasion of Iraq in DC in 2003, and noticing how many of the signs were misspelled. Friends tell me of conversations they had with the OWS folks, and how out of it these people were—with beliefs such as “all we need to do is switch to solar energy, and our problems will be solved” (one example among many). A good friend of mine, a prominent journalist, gave a talk at OWS in DC on U.S. foreign policy last October, and all of fifty people showed up (only two of whom were under sixty, by the way); the majority weren’t interested and had no time for serious intellectual analysis. The number of books that have appeared over the past decade, providing massive statistical evidence of the sheer ignorance and stupidity of the American public, has been quite impressive (Just How Stupid Are We?, Idiot America, etc. etc.); and if you look around at young people today—our supposed future—they can’t read. Their lives are comprised of cell phones and Twitter and Facebook. I am frequently in Mexico City, and I can’t tell you how often I’ve had conversations with taxi drivers about history, literature, and philosophy—all initiated by them. Try having similar discussions with a taxi driver in New York, see how far you get. Or just go out into the street of any American city, and ask the first person you run into how many justices there are on the Supreme Court, or what nation we seceded from in 1776, or where Europe is, or if they can define “retrograde” or “trachea.” If that doesn’t wake you up, my friends, nothing will. Bottom line: we are a collection of dummies, and dummies cannot “take back the country” any more than they can discuss the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If Americans don’t actually have fried rice inside their heads, they are doing an excellent job of imitating people who do; and with that level of cranial impairment, there will be no reversal of the disastrous downhill slide in which we are now engaged.
So let me conclude with my original point. As the above discussion would indicate, Heist is a film that gets you going. It contains much to admire, and (in my opinion) much to criticize; but that’s a good thing, as I’m sure Frances and Don would agree. Somehow, the movie needs to get wider exposure than a six-day run in some dilapidated repertory cinema in Berkeley, California. Frances and Don are courageous folks, and they have done this culture a great service. Whether the culture can appreciate that remains to be seen.
©Morris Berman, 2012
At the outset let me say that reviewing this film was, for me, a bit of an odd assignment. I love this film. I think it’s punchy and provocative, and that it speaks with an authentic voice. I think it’s important to get it into every Multiplex in the land, because the issues it raises are basic, controversial, and need to get discussed in every home, luncheonette, drug store, firehouse, and community college in the nation. A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen. The odd part of it, for me, was (since I’m not really a “progressive” or a socialist) that I found myself in serious disagreement with much of it. But the power of the film is its enormous potential to generate substantive dialogue, and this is the real source of my admiration of it.
Let me start with the good stuff, as it were. Beyond generating dialogue, Heist provides an alternative narrative to what’s been going on in this country since 1981. “Reaganomics,” or what we now call “neo-liberalism,” is the philosophy that economic growth is the answer to all our problems, because as the rich make more money, some of that will supposedly “trickle down” to the rest of us. This has been the dominant narrative in this country for the last thirty years, and what Heist clearly demonstrates is that it’s nothing more than pure kaka. What actually happened under this narrative was that wealth got transferred upward; that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer; that virtually nothing “trickled down”; that unions were busted, public services gutted, American manufacturing crippled, the media collapsed into six major corporations and turned into corporate propaganda mouthpieces, and so on—the America we have today, in other words, in which 1 out of every 5 of us is without work and without prospect of same for at least a decade, and in which 2 out of every 3 of us lives from paycheck to paycheck, hoping that some major accident won’t occur in our lives and put us underwater for good.
Heist is thus an exercise in counter-brainwashing: Reagan and his ilk, the Powell Memorandum and the so-called think tanks (read: propaganda machines) of the political right (American Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, etc.) all sold us a bill of goods, stole the American Dream out from under us, and we need to recognize that we’ve been economically and intellectually fleeced. Unless we can debunk the dominant narrative, and realize what really went down since 1981, we will not be able to take back the American Dream—which Causey and Goldmacher define as everyone getting a fair share of the economic pie.
The film also demonstrates that there really isn’t much of a difference between Democrats and Republicans on this score; all appearances to the contrary, Wall Street really is the government, and both parties understand this. Thus Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers worked in the Clinton administration; Clinton destroyed the welfare system; the gap between rich and poor widened during his presidency; and legislation making possible the whole system of CDO’s , credit-default swaps and the like—the further deregulation of the banking industry—occurred on his watch as well. As Gore Vidal wryly put it, the American political system consists of one political party with two right wings.
Finally, without being explicit, the film does suggest that there is something mentally unbalanced, if not downright sociopathic, about the American ruling class. The top 1% could care less about society at large, is the impression we get from this documentary; the only thing on their minds is profit. Recent years have seen the publication of a fair number of articles claiming that psychological studies of such people show that they have very little capacity for empathy, along with very high dopamine levels in the brain, which also depresses empathy and keeps them hyped up, always “on the go.” These people cannot grasp, as former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall says at one point in the movie, that taxes are the price of civilization; that every society must have civil institutions; and that the ideology of every man for himself is the antithesis of civilization—the ideology of lunatics, if I may embellish on his remarks.
So why am I having problems with this? It all seems reasonable enough, especially if you believe that if we don’t undertake a serious redistribution of wealth, we are finished as a society. Let me say a few words about Heist, then, by way of critique.
1. Greed, and the free-market ideology, were hardly born in 1981. In this sense, the film lacks a genuine (which is to say, long-range) historical perspective. Greed showed up on the American continent in the late sixteenth century, when what would later become the United States started to be colonized by a particularly aggressive and entrepreneurial segment of the English middle class. Louis Hartz makes this point in his classic work, The American Liberal Tradition (1955), when he says that America is a “fragment society,” i.e. one that took a particular strand from the mother country—in this case the mentality of hustling, of go-getting, of unlimited economic expansion—and made it into the whole of the new country. One might argue that Reagan represented a “quantum leap” in this ideology, but he hardly invented it; from Day One, it is what America has been about. Credit-default swaps are merely the inevitable culmination of a process that has been going on for more than four hundred years.
2. How deliberate is the so-called conspiracy against the poor and the middle class on the part of the rich and big business? Two points here:
a) These folks really do believe what they are saying. I’m absolutely convinced of that. In other words, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, they were and are convinced (conveniently for them, of course) that if they could become rich with no holds barred, everyone would be better off. This is not just a pose; they really did, and do, believe this. The goal was not to screw the working class, in other words; it was to create a template for even greater levels of business profit and expansion. “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA” rings true for them; they probably sew it on their pillows as a motto. Like the Tea Party, the rich believe that it is truly evil to limit the amount of wealth any one individual can accumulate, and that the government must not be allowed to get in the way of that. “It’s what made America great, etc.” This may not make the final result of what they are doing any different than if there were a genuine conspiracy afoot, but I do think we need to realize that these convictions are held as deeply by this class as are the semi-socialist convictions of the political left.
b) Ironically enough, the “oppressed” 99% that the Occupy Wall Street movement claimed to represent may not be that far from the ideology of the upper 1%. There has been much discussion, on the part of sociologists, as to why socialism never managed to take root in the United States, and the general consensus boils down to a remark once made by John Steinbeck: “In the U.S., the poor regard themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In ideological terms, the only difference between rich and poor in this country is that the latter don’t have any money. The interest of the poor or the middle class has not been to have the sort of civilization Robert Crandall talks about, or (also interviewed in the movie) Bernie Sanders does, which would include concern for the environment, the welfare of society, the fairness of our institutions, and so on—not at all. Their goal has been, since the late sixteenth century, to get into that upper 1%. When Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt in 1922, a biting satire of the hustling way of life, the reaction to the book on the part of Americans was not to smirk at George Babbitt, but to speculate on how they might become George Babbitt. There really are limits to the argument that a small cabal of the wealthy and powerful “did this” to us—the rape theory of American history, one might call it. It’s more likely that the process was one of consensual sex. It is hardly an accident that Mr. Reagan won the election in 1980 by one of the biggest landslides in American history, or that every year, when polls are taken of the “who’s-your-favorite-president” variety, Mr. Reagan comes out on top or close to it. Consider also the unrelenting popularity—for decades now—of a book such as Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. If Alan Greenspan was her protégé, so are we all; we all swim in the stagnant pool of her ideological pathology.
3. Like Occupy Wall Street, the film insists that we must “take back” the American Dream. Like OWS, it never seems to grasp the fact that rather than recovering or restoring the A.D., we need to abolish it. The A.D. is part of the American frontier mentality, coupled with the mythology of extreme individualism, and is in fact based on the idea of infinity: there can and should be no end to economic and technological expansion. Unfortunately for that hopelessly neurotic vision, we are fast running out of resources; the planet cannot support the A.D. extended to every American, let alone every person on the planet. In fact, it was once calculated that for everyone on the planet to have a “modest” middle-class American life, we would need the resources of six Earths. This is why socialism, or spreading the A.D. around more fairly, is not an adequate response to capitalism, because it too is based on the notions of “growth” and “progress,” and those notions are fast becoming obsolete. The real shift required is not to (let’s say) a Scandanavian-style economy, but to a steady-state one: no growth, and not profit-oriented. And if the left hates this, as I’m sure they do: well hard cheese, folks, because in thirty to forty years we are going to be forced into this, when petroleum runs out and the dream of unlimited energy turns into the nightmare of scarcity. To socialists and capitalists alike, to Paul Krugman and Robert Reich and every other so-called liberal, I can only say this: permanent growth means permanent crisis. It’s time to start equating this type of growth with cancer.
4. Which means to me that significant historical change will come to America as “capitalism hits the fan,” to quote Richard Wolff, and it will obviously involve more than just the United States. Heist puts a lot of stock in Occupy Wall Street and grass-roots organizing, which gives it (in my view) a rather dated flavor. OWS was a colossal flop; it didn’t amount to much of anything, when the dust settled; it just came and went, like yet one more American fad, and the question we have to ask is Why? Again, I refer you to the comment of John Steinbeck, and the discussion in 2(b), above; but beyond that, let me make two crucial points here:
First, when Robert Crandall argues that the ideology of every man for himself is the antithesis of civilization, we need to recognize—again—that extreme individualism is literally the core of American civilization, and thus that we never really constituted much of a civilization. We do not operate out of a moral center, in the U.S.; “more” is hardly a reasonable philosophy of life, and that is pretty much what we’ve been about. Don’t kid yourself: Miles Davis and Melville and J.D. Salinger and Thomas Cole arose in spite of the American way of life, not because of it, and Georges Clemenceau was on the mark when he commented that America was “the only nation that went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening phase of civilization.” I mean, let’s call a spade a spade here: Heist’s idea of change, as with OWS’ idea, is purely economic in nature; it’s not really about a truly different kind of culture. Nor can we expect such a shift, after four hundred years of doing just one thing. Over and over again, I heard OWS tell us that we needed to cut the pie up in a fairer way. Not once did I hear them say that the problem was the pie itself; that it was, in the final analysis, rotten.
Second, the movie tells us that Americans have the drive and initiative to change things, to “take back” our country (whatever that means), and to challenge the power elite. I’m not sure Frances and Don are living on the same planet I am, if I can level with you here. Even a casual observation of Americans, and of American behavior, will tell you that we have no such drive and initiative—we seem exhausted, spiritually spent—and truth be told, we are not very bright, as a people. I remember marching against the invasion of Iraq in DC in 2003, and noticing how many of the signs were misspelled. Friends tell me of conversations they had with the OWS folks, and how out of it these people were—with beliefs such as “all we need to do is switch to solar energy, and our problems will be solved” (one example among many). A good friend of mine, a prominent journalist, gave a talk at OWS in DC on U.S. foreign policy last October, and all of fifty people showed up (only two of whom were under sixty, by the way); the majority weren’t interested and had no time for serious intellectual analysis. The number of books that have appeared over the past decade, providing massive statistical evidence of the sheer ignorance and stupidity of the American public, has been quite impressive (Just How Stupid Are We?, Idiot America, etc. etc.); and if you look around at young people today—our supposed future—they can’t read. Their lives are comprised of cell phones and Twitter and Facebook. I am frequently in Mexico City, and I can’t tell you how often I’ve had conversations with taxi drivers about history, literature, and philosophy—all initiated by them. Try having similar discussions with a taxi driver in New York, see how far you get. Or just go out into the street of any American city, and ask the first person you run into how many justices there are on the Supreme Court, or what nation we seceded from in 1776, or where Europe is, or if they can define “retrograde” or “trachea.” If that doesn’t wake you up, my friends, nothing will. Bottom line: we are a collection of dummies, and dummies cannot “take back the country” any more than they can discuss the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If Americans don’t actually have fried rice inside their heads, they are doing an excellent job of imitating people who do; and with that level of cranial impairment, there will be no reversal of the disastrous downhill slide in which we are now engaged.
So let me conclude with my original point. As the above discussion would indicate, Heist is a film that gets you going. It contains much to admire, and (in my opinion) much to criticize; but that’s a good thing, as I’m sure Frances and Don would agree. Somehow, the movie needs to get wider exposure than a six-day run in some dilapidated repertory cinema in Berkeley, California. Frances and Don are courageous folks, and they have done this culture a great service. Whether the culture can appreciate that remains to be seen.
©Morris Berman, 2012
July 12, 2012
150
Dear Wafers and Others:
Yes, we've made it to 150 posts, a milestone of sorts. Actually, my reason for starting a new post is that the system gets funny after 200 messages, and starts filing the overrun in another place. (I really don't know how these things work, I confess.) Message 201 was from Mike Alan, about Dmitry Orlov's recent discussion of psychotic denial of the American collapse on the part of Americans. I suspect this phenomenon is familiar to most of you out there, who have tried to talk to your fellow country(wo)men about WAF or related subjects. Having a discussion with an American is typically scary or depressing or both, as most of you know. While I'm not sure that all 311 million of our fellow country(wo)men are psychotic, I am convinced that at least 99.9% of them have a puree of steamed vegetables inside their heads; which would produce the same result, I'm guessing. In any case, I'm hoping Mike Alan will read this and re-send his message, but this time to this new post.
Lemmings Awake! - The latest in my trendy T-shirt series (any three for $19.95, plus s&h).
-mb
Yes, we've made it to 150 posts, a milestone of sorts. Actually, my reason for starting a new post is that the system gets funny after 200 messages, and starts filing the overrun in another place. (I really don't know how these things work, I confess.) Message 201 was from Mike Alan, about Dmitry Orlov's recent discussion of psychotic denial of the American collapse on the part of Americans. I suspect this phenomenon is familiar to most of you out there, who have tried to talk to your fellow country(wo)men about WAF or related subjects. Having a discussion with an American is typically scary or depressing or both, as most of you know. While I'm not sure that all 311 million of our fellow country(wo)men are psychotic, I am convinced that at least 99.9% of them have a puree of steamed vegetables inside their heads; which would produce the same result, I'm guessing. In any case, I'm hoping Mike Alan will read this and re-send his message, but this time to this new post.
Lemmings Awake! - The latest in my trendy T-shirt series (any three for $19.95, plus s&h).
-mb
June 27, 2012
In a Nutshell
-----Original
Message-----
From: Mr. X
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:16 AM
To: mauricio@morrisberman.com
Subject: Thank you
From: Mr. X
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:16 AM
To: mauricio@morrisberman.com
Subject: Thank you
|
Mr. Berman,
In the last few
weeks I've read The Twilight of
American Culture and the first half of Dark Ages America, and I feel compelled to write and thank you.
I'm 56 years old,
and for most of my life I've been haunted by the sense that, between the
world I grew up in and the world I ended up in, something went terribly
wrong. Don't misunderstand - I'm not a nut. I'm a management consultant
working with large arts organizations around issues of strategy and
innovation, and pretty successful at it by the standards of an economically
oriented world. But I have been haunted (it's the only word that works) by a
bone deep sense that something very fundamental went amiss in my lifetime.
Your work has helped me to understand the source of my disquiet.
I think there must
be millions like me facing a terrible choice. On one hand we can face the
triumph in our time of a global consumer culture, and the soul sickness it
creates and depends on, and live with the misery that nothing we can do can
turn that historic tide. On the other, we can indulge in the delusion that if
we just recycle enough, or embrace our inner child, or save the white tigers,
or indulge in any number of anodynes, that we can change the world and redeem
our species.
It's really a
choice of miseries - the misery of seeing a terrible truth, or the misery of
denial. I have envied people who could do the latter, and tried to myself,
but with no success. Your work has helped me realize that, for me anyway, the
misery of denial is the greater of the two. Thank you.
|
Dear Mr. X,
Yeah, that
does summarize the choice, n'est-ce pas? A few things to check out, after you
finish DAA:
1. The
sequel, Why America Failed.
2. The 1st
half of A Question of Values.
3. My
essay, buried somewhere in the archives of my blog (late 2011?), called
"La longue duree."
Briefly,
the way out is thru. We can't reverse this corporate-consumerist tide. Nothing
can. It has to play out to its full self-destruction. But while this is going
on, there are independent alternatives that are sprouting (including, in the
US, secessionist movements), experiments in nonprofit and steady-state types of
economy, that will become increasingly attractive as the colossus we live in
cracks up. This is 30-40 yrs away, but they are, I believe, a viable
future--simply because we shall have no other choice than decentralization and
eco-sustainability (accompanied by significant austerity). We are fast
approaching a world of limits, in short.
Folks on
my blog thought I was kidding re: my enthusiasm for a Palin presidency (for
example); but the fact is that Obama's destruction of the US has been ad hoc
and desultory. With a full-fledged nut like Palin or Bachmann in the White
House, the whole process would be greatly accelerated. The notion that the ills
of the US might be cured via the ballot box is quite mad, in my view. Hence,
might as well have a Herman Cain or Rick Perry at the helm, to get the job over
with. Romney will move in this direction, of course, but as in the case of the
late Roman Empire, better to have a completely mindless buffoon in charge. In
the meantime, there are only two options for the aware American (all 453 of
them) that I can see: emigrate (my solution, in part), or take the NMI option
outlined in the Twilight book (the
other part of my solution).
Hope this
helps. Thanks for writing.
Mb
June 24, 2012
Higher Education in America
Andrew Delbanco, who teaches American Studies at Columbia, recently wrote a book on the sorry state of higher education in America: College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, in which he maps the distance between Is and Ought in the U.S. college system. The college experience, he writes, should be a formative one, in which students are "deterred from sheer self-interest toward a life of enlarged sympathy and civic responsibility." Reviewing the book in the June 10th NYTBR, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, adds that Delbanco believes that college should be a time for them "to see things from another's point of view and to develop a sense of ethical responsibility...[to turn] the soul away from selfish concerns and toward community." "At the core of the college idea," writes Delbanco, is the notion that "to serve others is to serve oneself."
Something like that may have existed in America at one time, but if so, that era is long gone--as most analysts of our educational system clearly recognize. A study of American college students conducted by the University of Michigan over 1979-2009 revealed a 40% drop in empathy during that time period, along with a fundamental inability to grasp another person's point of view. Another study--the source of which escapes me at the moment--recorded that while in 1965, something like 75% of college freshmen stated that they were in college to develop a workable philosophy of life, by 1985-1990 75% of them said they were there to get rich.
Along with the collapse of empathy is the collapse of learning tout court. In Academically Adrift, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that after two years of college, 45% of American students haven’t learned anything, and after four years, 36% haven’t. Most students, they discovered, define college as a social, not an academic or intellectual, experience; half the students in their study said they hadn’t taken a single course in the previous semester that required more than 20 pages of writing, and a third said they hadn’t taken a course requiring more than 40 pages of reading. A Marist poll released on 4 July 2011 (appropriately enough) showed that 69% of Americans in the under-30 age group are unaware that the U.S. declared its independence in 1776.
All of this, of course, is central to the decline of the United States that I have documented in my own work. After all, you can't have much of a future if this is what American youth has come to. There are many reasons for this catastrophe, but to my mind the major one is the conversion of education into a business, and the university into a corporation. Once the corporate-consumer model of education took hold, all those previous ideals described by Delbanco went up in smoke. Interviewed by the NYTBR in the May 27th issue, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust identified Clark Kerr's (in)famous study of 1963, The Uses of the University, as "the best book she had read about academia." In response, Jeff Zorn, who teaches English at Santa Clara University, commented (NYTBR, June 17th) that Kerr's book
"welcomed the very developments that have made American higher education so generally lame: the denigration of teaching; the loss of a center, academically and spiritually: the selling out to Big Business, Big Government, Big Foundations...[and] the redefinition of liberal education...to a vocational major."
Kerr, he concludes, sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, and president Faust doesn't seem to notice (or, perhaps, to mind). As Slavoj Zizek recently put it, we now live in "a new socioeconomic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticized technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy." I'm not sure how "new" all this is; we were always, as I have argued, a nation of hustlers; but imported into education, the results are quite obvious. It's hardly an accident that the class of 2012 is out to make money (in point of fact, they can't even find a job), doesn't give a damn about anybody else, and knows virtually nothing; or that (according to a Newsweek poll of 2011) 73% of Americans can’t give the official version of why we fought the Cold War, and 44% are unable to define the Bill of Rights. Indeed, how many even care about our now-shredded Bill of Rights, courtesy of Mr. Obama? Awareness of (for example) the National Defense Authorization Act, with its provision for "indefinite detention," is practically nonexistent, and I'm guessing that less than 2% of American college graduates know what habeas corpus is (make that, was).
Finally, let's not talk of "repairing" the system; under the corporate-consumer model, it can only get worse. Real education--Bildung, in the German sense of the term--can get no traction in the technocorporate state, which is not exactly a breeding ground for creative, independent thought. It can only be pursued by misfits, by the marginalized, by the very few who still think that learning for learning's sake, and the sake of the larger community, is a meaningful ideal. In the America of today, there aren't too many of those around.
(c)Morris Berman, 2012
Something like that may have existed in America at one time, but if so, that era is long gone--as most analysts of our educational system clearly recognize. A study of American college students conducted by the University of Michigan over 1979-2009 revealed a 40% drop in empathy during that time period, along with a fundamental inability to grasp another person's point of view. Another study--the source of which escapes me at the moment--recorded that while in 1965, something like 75% of college freshmen stated that they were in college to develop a workable philosophy of life, by 1985-1990 75% of them said they were there to get rich.
Along with the collapse of empathy is the collapse of learning tout court. In Academically Adrift, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that after two years of college, 45% of American students haven’t learned anything, and after four years, 36% haven’t. Most students, they discovered, define college as a social, not an academic or intellectual, experience; half the students in their study said they hadn’t taken a single course in the previous semester that required more than 20 pages of writing, and a third said they hadn’t taken a course requiring more than 40 pages of reading. A Marist poll released on 4 July 2011 (appropriately enough) showed that 69% of Americans in the under-30 age group are unaware that the U.S. declared its independence in 1776.
All of this, of course, is central to the decline of the United States that I have documented in my own work. After all, you can't have much of a future if this is what American youth has come to. There are many reasons for this catastrophe, but to my mind the major one is the conversion of education into a business, and the university into a corporation. Once the corporate-consumer model of education took hold, all those previous ideals described by Delbanco went up in smoke. Interviewed by the NYTBR in the May 27th issue, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust identified Clark Kerr's (in)famous study of 1963, The Uses of the University, as "the best book she had read about academia." In response, Jeff Zorn, who teaches English at Santa Clara University, commented (NYTBR, June 17th) that Kerr's book
"welcomed the very developments that have made American higher education so generally lame: the denigration of teaching; the loss of a center, academically and spiritually: the selling out to Big Business, Big Government, Big Foundations...[and] the redefinition of liberal education...to a vocational major."
Kerr, he concludes, sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, and president Faust doesn't seem to notice (or, perhaps, to mind). As Slavoj Zizek recently put it, we now live in "a new socioeconomic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticized technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy." I'm not sure how "new" all this is; we were always, as I have argued, a nation of hustlers; but imported into education, the results are quite obvious. It's hardly an accident that the class of 2012 is out to make money (in point of fact, they can't even find a job), doesn't give a damn about anybody else, and knows virtually nothing; or that (according to a Newsweek poll of 2011) 73% of Americans can’t give the official version of why we fought the Cold War, and 44% are unable to define the Bill of Rights. Indeed, how many even care about our now-shredded Bill of Rights, courtesy of Mr. Obama? Awareness of (for example) the National Defense Authorization Act, with its provision for "indefinite detention," is practically nonexistent, and I'm guessing that less than 2% of American college graduates know what habeas corpus is (make that, was).
Finally, let's not talk of "repairing" the system; under the corporate-consumer model, it can only get worse. Real education--Bildung, in the German sense of the term--can get no traction in the technocorporate state, which is not exactly a breeding ground for creative, independent thought. It can only be pursued by misfits, by the marginalized, by the very few who still think that learning for learning's sake, and the sake of the larger community, is a meaningful ideal. In the America of today, there aren't too many of those around.
(c)Morris Berman, 2012
June 20, 2012
The Rain in Spain
Dear Friends:
As some of you know, I just returned from 2-3 weeks in Spain, where I went to promote the Spanish translation of Why America Failed--translated there as Las raices del fracaso americano (The roots of the american failure). This included interviews with a number of newspapers, and also a video interview in Madrid with an outfit called periodista digital (the digital reporter). For some odd reason, they insisted that I do it in English, and that my publisher/editor/translator, Eduardo Rabasa, provide a running translation of what I was saying. So it comes off a bit uneven, but the interviewer did manage to ask questions that went to the heart of the matter. Hence, a decent job overall, if rather brief (which could be good, of course). For readers of this blog, or of WAF, this material may be a bit redundant, but I offer it up as another take on the whole issue of why the US is slowly sliding into the sea (along with Spain, which foolishly chose to follow the American socioeconomic model--a guaranteed recipe for disaster). Apparently, this interview is also running on YouTube; but the link I have for it is as follows:
http://www.periodistadigital.com/ocio-y-cultura/libros/2012/06/14/morris-berman-sexto-piso-raices-del-fracaso-americano-crepusculo-cultura.shtml
As some of you know, I just returned from 2-3 weeks in Spain, where I went to promote the Spanish translation of Why America Failed--translated there as Las raices del fracaso americano (The roots of the american failure). This included interviews with a number of newspapers, and also a video interview in Madrid with an outfit called periodista digital (the digital reporter). For some odd reason, they insisted that I do it in English, and that my publisher/editor/translator, Eduardo Rabasa, provide a running translation of what I was saying. So it comes off a bit uneven, but the interviewer did manage to ask questions that went to the heart of the matter. Hence, a decent job overall, if rather brief (which could be good, of course). For readers of this blog, or of WAF, this material may be a bit redundant, but I offer it up as another take on the whole issue of why the US is slowly sliding into the sea (along with Spain, which foolishly chose to follow the American socioeconomic model--a guaranteed recipe for disaster). Apparently, this interview is also running on YouTube; but the link I have for it is as follows:
http://www.periodistadigital.com/ocio-y-cultura/libros/2012/06/14/morris-berman-sexto-piso-raices-del-fracaso-americano-crepusculo-cultura.shtml
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