Occasionally I get a letter from a reader of myTwilight of American Culture, complaining that history and sociology are all well and good, but that I should give the public more of the actual details of the decline of the United States. They are right, of course, the more so since we swim in the raw data of the latter on a daily basis. A recent encounter with the American medical establishment provided me with clear evidence that “twilight” is hardly an abstract concept.
My regular doctor, a very intelligent, white-haired gentleman of the old school, also happens to be a gastroenterologist, and so is always on my case about having a colonoscopy. (“I’m lucky you’re not a neurosurgeon,” I once kidded him. “Would be too late in your case anyway,” he shot back.) He had given me one six years ago, when I briefly had a real job and therefore had real health insurance; but one reason I kept putting it off was that as a free-lancer, I was now paying a high monthly premium for insurance that was, in the crunch, worthless. Somehow, my insurance company always had a reason why this particular claim (whatever it was) was not covered, and I could either let it go–my usual choice, since arguing with them was pointless–or appeal it, in which case I would get a check for $50 or so six months later. So I kept telling him I couldn’t afford it, until he finally offered to cut me a deal. “I usually get a grand for the job,” he said; “I’ll do it for you for $600. In addition, you should call the surgery facility in Bethesda and tell them that for a significant reduction in price, you’ll pay them up front. Finally, you can try to negotiate with the anesthesiologist, who also charges a grand.”
So I took his instructions. I called Judy at the surgery facility; she told me that if I brought the cash in an envelope, she’d drop the cost from $1000 to $470. As for anesthesia, I decided to go without, and save myself at least $600, probably more. “I don’t recommend it,” my doctor said; “the procedure takes about fifteen minutes, and without anesthesia it’s going to hurt.” “Hey,” I told him, “a total of $1070 out of pocket is already more than I can afford; I’m a writer, you know what we make.” “Your call,” he shrugged.
Two months later, the day before the procedure, I called Judy once again. She had no memory of our conversation, so I had to tell her that we had agreed upon $470, and that there would be no anesthesia. “I’m sorry I can’t remember; I just dropped my daughter off at the testing place, where she’s taking her SATs. I’m concerned about her doing well, so I guess I’m not thinking very clearly.” “No worries,” I told her; “they now add something like 200 points for free. All American high school kids are now above average, so I’m sure she’ll do well.” She laughed. “Yeah...I know, you’re right.”
“Listen,” I said, “why don’t you take down all my data now, so that when I come in tomorrow, I won’t have to do reams of paperwork.” She agreed, noted the various meds I was on and so forth. “See you tomorrow,” she said brightly.
I arrived the next day, and handed Judy $470 in a plain brown envelope. It felt like hush money, or some sort of payola. Then they took me back to the pre-op room; it turned out that there was no record whatsoever of yesterday’s phone conversation with Judy, so I had to repeat everything I had told her the day before, including the bit about no anesthesia. Then my doctor came in. “How’s it going?” he asked. “Fine. Listen,” I said, “you’re doing me a favor by cutting me a deal, so I’m going to write you a check right now, before we get started.” He grunted; I handed him a check for $600. He pointed to the OR. “See you in there when you’re ready.”
So next I’m lying on the hospital cot, hooked up to a monitor, and he’s telling me about his vacation in Germany and Switzerland as he’s poking my anus. “OK, here we go.” Before too long I was screaming. It seems that there’s no problem when the plastic tube traverses straight colon, but when it goes around a bend–watch out. While I was screaming, I reflected on the fact that this would be a useful technique for extracting information at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, except that I had no information to disclose. It was unbearable, and of the fifteen minutes I spent on the cot, I probably screamed for three. In the middle of this, my doctor’s cell phone went off, and he took the call. I tried to say, “If it’s for me, tell them I’ll get back to them later,” but I was too busy screaming. “Can’t talk right now,” my doctor said, and rang off. (Then why have the damn thing on? I thought.)
Finally, it was over. I got off the cot and slowly made my way back to the pre-op room to dress. My doctor stuck his head in. “Doing OK?” “Yeah...I guess so. Say, it says on this sheet the nurse gave me that I need to make a follow-up appointment for two weeks from now.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t bother with that, since we’re economizing here”; meaning: we only schedule those things to make more money, but since you are relatively broke, I’m not going to screw you. “See you in five years,” I said.
Out in the waiting room, the receptionist handed me an envelope. “Here are your personal effects,” she said. I looked at it closely: “Seymour Hockenhauser” was clearly printed at the top. “I’m not Seymour Hockenhauser,” I told her, handing it back. “Oh,” she said, “didn’t you give me anything?” “I guess not,” I replied. “Have a nice day,” she said.
I dragged my sorry ass out to the parking lot. One advantage of not having anesthesia is that you get to drive yourself home.
April 25, 2006
Ik Is Us: The Every-Person-for-Themselves 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 ethos: you help other people. As a result, I have been living in a state of culture shock on a daily basis for nearly six decades. As lawyer “Jackie Chiles” (a Johnnie Cochran look-alike) says in the final episode of 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 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–Tom, I think his name was–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, 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 good 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. 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 I am returning home, on crutches, from knee surgery. As I approach the side door of my building, someone who also lives in the building is coming down the walk, busily talking on a 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 through 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 Inpatient Desk.” Given the possible 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 Inpatient 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, keeps on going. “Here!” I shout; “it’s right here.” He just keeps on walking down the hall.
A few days after this incident, 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. The kicker was that the police were there, wheeling shopping carts, 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.”
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. The Ik had been reduced to a condition of savage self-interest due to economic hardship. Turnbull describes how, when someone in the tribe died, neighbors (as well as children and siblings) would fight over the person's few belongings, and 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 the future of a country in which the police join the looters in their looting while all around them people are dying by the thousands?
Any ideas?
Not helping other people is systemic in the United States. 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–Tom, I think his name was–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, 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 good 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. 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 I am returning home, on crutches, from knee surgery. As I approach the side door of my building, someone who also lives in the building is coming down the walk, busily talking on a 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 through 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 Inpatient Desk.” Given the possible 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 Inpatient 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, keeps on going. “Here!” I shout; “it’s right here.” He just keeps on walking down the hall.
A few days after this incident, 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. The kicker was that the police were there, wheeling shopping carts, 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.”
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. The Ik had been reduced to a condition of savage self-interest due to economic hardship. Turnbull describes how, when someone in the tribe died, neighbors (as well as children and siblings) would fight over the person's few belongings, and 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 the future of a country in which the police join the looters in their looting while all around them people are dying by the thousands?
Any ideas?
The Real Gold
I confess I never gave much thought to Colombia during most of my life; or at least, not more than I did, let's say, to Kenya or Bangladesh. Real ignorance on my part, to be sure (familiarity with the work of Gabriel García Márquez notwithstanding); but my impressions of Colombia were formed by the American (U.S.) media, so what typically came to mind when the country was mentioned were drugs and violence. Then suddenly, a short time ago, I received an invitation to speak in Bogotá, so I just decided to suspend any prejudgments I had and get on the plane.
The occasion was a lanzamiento, or "launching" of the second edition of a book of mine that had been translated into Spanish a few years back. During the week of my visit, my sponsor, whom I'll refer to as José, arranged a dinner at which I would be able to meet a number of distinguished writers from the Latinoamerican world. These were folks who had won an international competition–drawing on Colombia, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela–and who had, as a result, come to Colombia and give a week of workshops to aspiring writers. We met, all ten of us, at a fairly elegant restaurant in downtown Bogotá, at about 8:30 p.m.
It was a delightful evening. What was most striking to me was the ambience, the energy that moved around the table. Put a collection of leading writers, academics, businessmen, artists–practically anybody, really–together in the United States, and what you frequently wind up with is a bunch of aggressive egos competing to be Number One. The conversation will be subtly boastful, filled with witty put-downs and a kind of controlled (or not-so-controlled) narcissism that is so common in the U.S. that we don't even notice it; anthropologically speaking, it's just part of the air we breathe. These Latinos, by contrast, were gracious, suave, and low-key. They joked a lot, reflected on art and literature, and obviously enjoyed each other's company. I couldn't help thinking that whereas so much ritual interaction in the U.S. seems to have a tacit agenda or subtext of promoting oneself at the expense of others, the interaction among this group was about respecting each other, making everybody feel valued. It's a cliché, of course, but sometimes you can't see the "given" of your own culture until you are confronted with the "otherness" of another one.Dinner over, we all shook hands and parted. José and I and another writer, Alberto, walked out of the building and onto the street. As Alberto walked away, I noticed he was rather overweight and walked with a slight limp. There was something very human about this; something real and vulnerable. And then, he unexpectedly turned toward me and said, quite simply, "Bienvenidos." It was casual, but nevertheless very poignant: deliberate inclusion of the outsider; recognition.
A couple of days later, having some free time on my hands, I decided to visit Bogotá's famous gold museum, the Museo de Oro. Actually, I was finding it a bit boring. Anthropological significance aside, gold just doesn't turn my crank, even when it is artistically crafted. Standing in front of one display, I looked around to discover that I was surrounded by something like fifty schoolchildren, ages twelve to sixteen, all
in uniform. Three schoolgirls moved closer to me; the most "courageous" asked me, in Spanish, if I had the time. I showed her my watch. "Tres y diez," I tell her. "Are you a visitor?" she continued (she's now eight inches away from me). I was suddenly aware that what was happening would strike an odd note in an American (U.S.) context. For one thing, Americans are not terribly interested in foreigners, as far as I can make out; only twelve percent of U.S. adults own a passport, for example. And American schoolgirls would not be likely to approach a white-haired man in his sixties unless it was part of an inside joke. I was startled by the simplicity and directness of this encounter; clearly, this young lady had every right to be taken seriously. We chatted for a while in Spanish, as two of her girlfriends listened in, intently. I told her I was a writer from the United States, here to talk about one of my books. I asked her what school they were all from (San Agustín), and what the class subject was (anthropology). Finally, we stopped talking and just smiled; I touched her lightly on the shoulder and said, "Adios."
About an hour later I was sitting at the entrance to the museum, indoors, at the far end of a low stone ledge, writing these notes, when my three new "friends," along with the rest of the horde, swept through the lobby. They all crowded onto the ledge, the three girls making a point of plunking themselves down right next to me, causing me to scramble to shove my briefcase and jacket out of the way, so as to make room for them. Two of the girls were hugging each other, which struck me as being very sweet, and–again–something one just doesn't see in the U.S. The "courageous" one looked over at my notes.
"Qué escribe?" she said, looking up at me. I couldn't very well tell her I was writing about her and her friends, so instead I asked her what other class trips they had all been on. "This one is the first," she said, "but next month we're going to the planetarium." I asked her what she thought about gold; she just shrugged. "Perhaps the stars will be more exciting," I suggested. She laughed. At this point their teacher announced that they needed to leave, and they all stood up to go. As they swarmed away, the two younger girls, who were still hugging each other, turned around andlooked back. "Bye," one of them said in English, smiling at me. "Bye," I replied. The hall emptied out; it was suddenly silent again. I sat there, thinking about the sheer "innocence," the natural friendliness, of the whole interaction–interaction of a kind that no longer seems to be part of the U.S. social landscape. How much, I thought, we have lost, without even realizing it.
So I didn't find any drugs or violence in Colombia, though I have no doubt that they are there. But I couldn't help reflecting on the possibility that there are different types of violence in this world, and that the relentless destruction of "social capital," as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam calls positive human interactions and relations, has to be one of the most pernicious forms, especially when it seems to permeate an entire society (sort of like odorless gas, or like something that got put into the water supply). What have we norteños paid in return for our extreme individualism, our constant competition, and our sad confusion of "goods" with "the good life"? Another sociologist, Robert Bellah, puts it this way: “Our material success,” he writes, “is our punishment, in terms of what that success has done to the natural environment, our social fabric, and our personal lives.”
I guess there's no turning back now.
©Morris Berman, 2006
The occasion was a lanzamiento, or "launching" of the second edition of a book of mine that had been translated into Spanish a few years back. During the week of my visit, my sponsor, whom I'll refer to as José, arranged a dinner at which I would be able to meet a number of distinguished writers from the Latinoamerican world. These were folks who had won an international competition–drawing on Colombia, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela–and who had, as a result, come to Colombia and give a week of workshops to aspiring writers. We met, all ten of us, at a fairly elegant restaurant in downtown Bogotá, at about 8:30 p.m.
It was a delightful evening. What was most striking to me was the ambience, the energy that moved around the table. Put a collection of leading writers, academics, businessmen, artists–practically anybody, really–together in the United States, and what you frequently wind up with is a bunch of aggressive egos competing to be Number One. The conversation will be subtly boastful, filled with witty put-downs and a kind of controlled (or not-so-controlled) narcissism that is so common in the U.S. that we don't even notice it; anthropologically speaking, it's just part of the air we breathe. These Latinos, by contrast, were gracious, suave, and low-key. They joked a lot, reflected on art and literature, and obviously enjoyed each other's company. I couldn't help thinking that whereas so much ritual interaction in the U.S. seems to have a tacit agenda or subtext of promoting oneself at the expense of others, the interaction among this group was about respecting each other, making everybody feel valued. It's a cliché, of course, but sometimes you can't see the "given" of your own culture until you are confronted with the "otherness" of another one.Dinner over, we all shook hands and parted. José and I and another writer, Alberto, walked out of the building and onto the street. As Alberto walked away, I noticed he was rather overweight and walked with a slight limp. There was something very human about this; something real and vulnerable. And then, he unexpectedly turned toward me and said, quite simply, "Bienvenidos." It was casual, but nevertheless very poignant: deliberate inclusion of the outsider; recognition.
A couple of days later, having some free time on my hands, I decided to visit Bogotá's famous gold museum, the Museo de Oro. Actually, I was finding it a bit boring. Anthropological significance aside, gold just doesn't turn my crank, even when it is artistically crafted. Standing in front of one display, I looked around to discover that I was surrounded by something like fifty schoolchildren, ages twelve to sixteen, all
in uniform. Three schoolgirls moved closer to me; the most "courageous" asked me, in Spanish, if I had the time. I showed her my watch. "Tres y diez," I tell her. "Are you a visitor?" she continued (she's now eight inches away from me). I was suddenly aware that what was happening would strike an odd note in an American (U.S.) context. For one thing, Americans are not terribly interested in foreigners, as far as I can make out; only twelve percent of U.S. adults own a passport, for example. And American schoolgirls would not be likely to approach a white-haired man in his sixties unless it was part of an inside joke. I was startled by the simplicity and directness of this encounter; clearly, this young lady had every right to be taken seriously. We chatted for a while in Spanish, as two of her girlfriends listened in, intently. I told her I was a writer from the United States, here to talk about one of my books. I asked her what school they were all from (San Agustín), and what the class subject was (anthropology). Finally, we stopped talking and just smiled; I touched her lightly on the shoulder and said, "Adios."
About an hour later I was sitting at the entrance to the museum, indoors, at the far end of a low stone ledge, writing these notes, when my three new "friends," along with the rest of the horde, swept through the lobby. They all crowded onto the ledge, the three girls making a point of plunking themselves down right next to me, causing me to scramble to shove my briefcase and jacket out of the way, so as to make room for them. Two of the girls were hugging each other, which struck me as being very sweet, and–again–something one just doesn't see in the U.S. The "courageous" one looked over at my notes.
"Qué escribe?" she said, looking up at me. I couldn't very well tell her I was writing about her and her friends, so instead I asked her what other class trips they had all been on. "This one is the first," she said, "but next month we're going to the planetarium." I asked her what she thought about gold; she just shrugged. "Perhaps the stars will be more exciting," I suggested. She laughed. At this point their teacher announced that they needed to leave, and they all stood up to go. As they swarmed away, the two younger girls, who were still hugging each other, turned around andlooked back. "Bye," one of them said in English, smiling at me. "Bye," I replied. The hall emptied out; it was suddenly silent again. I sat there, thinking about the sheer "innocence," the natural friendliness, of the whole interaction–interaction of a kind that no longer seems to be part of the U.S. social landscape. How much, I thought, we have lost, without even realizing it.
So I didn't find any drugs or violence in Colombia, though I have no doubt that they are there. But I couldn't help reflecting on the possibility that there are different types of violence in this world, and that the relentless destruction of "social capital," as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam calls positive human interactions and relations, has to be one of the most pernicious forms, especially when it seems to permeate an entire society (sort of like odorless gas, or like something that got put into the water supply). What have we norteños paid in return for our extreme individualism, our constant competition, and our sad confusion of "goods" with "the good life"? Another sociologist, Robert Bellah, puts it this way: “Our material success,” he writes, “is our punishment, in terms of what that success has done to the natural environment, our social fabric, and our personal lives.”
I guess there's no turning back now.
©Morris Berman, 2006
The Denial of the Body in the 21st Century
“Make Love Not War.” It was a favorite slogan of the 1960s; one often saw these words on placards at Vietnam protest marches. The motto was based on the work of the Austrian psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich, who argued that when people are deprived of satisfying sexual love, their repression turns into aggression. Now we are faced with a possible American war against Iraq, and one can’t help wondering if Reich’s analysis still holds true.
Of course, one of the problems with Reich is that he construed the idea of the repression of erotic life much too narrowly. As I argue in my book, Cuerpo y Espiritu: La historia oculta de occidente, eros—the life of the body—is not just about sex. The ability to breathe deeply, to feel the sun on one’s cheek, even to smell the strong aroma of coffee in a Barcelona café—all of these things are avenues into our emotional life. They bespeak a world of primary satisfaction. The notion that there can be a life of the mind separate from the body is a Puritan fantasy, and it has done the human race untold harm. It leads to a world of secondary satisfaction, a world of substitute satisfactions that we normally call “addictions”. This includes psychological “drugs” as well as chemical ones, and in this category we can put the lust for power, for control, for violence itself. War is a heady wine; it enables us to get high not only from rage and destruction, but from the self-righteousness, the phony moral indignation, that is used to justify this behavior.
Why would the United States suddenly want to go to war with Iraq, especially when the latter has no clear tie to the Al Qaeda network, and when the CIA has bluntly told President Bush that Saddam Hussein is less of a threat left alone than if attacked? As a number of scholars and journalists have pointed out, this war—if it indeed comes to pass—is not really about Iraq as a political opponent or about its alleged weapons of mass destruction. More significant is the American desire to take over Iraqi oil fields, as well as the the intention of having a controlling (military) presence in the Middle East—a key feature of America’s plans for global hegemony. But there is a hidden dimension to all of this, I believe, where the life of the body needs to get factored into the equation. The former American president, Jimmy Carter, alluded to this in an essay he wrote for the Washington Post several weeks before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Remarking that “there is no current danger to the United States from Baghdad,” Carter said that war fever was being fomented by “a core group of conservatives trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.”
I do not wish to make too much out of this; it is easy to get seduced by a kind of psychological reductionism. War, as we all know, is a complex phenomenon; it cannot be attributed to a single cause, and I am not making any such claim. But Carter’s remark does beg the obvious question: Where do these pent-up ambitions come from? Reading Nicholas Lemann’s descriptions of Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (New Yorker, 7 May 2001; 14/21 October 2002)—to take only two members of the pro-war team—one is struck by how “out of touch” these individuals are. Nothing, or so it would seem, could be more lacking in their lives than an awareness of the body and its emotions. Cheney’s perfectionism is so legendary, and his anger so rigidly under control, that he has suffered a string of heart attacks as a result. Watching him on television, one has the impression of someone barely able to conceal his contempt, his posture of virtuous inflexibility. As for Ms. Rice, the picture that emerges is one of a life that is extremely “successful,” at the cost of her having no loves and no real friends. In television interviews, she tends to talk in clichés, and of a black-and-white world of good vs. evil. There is a terrible sadness to people such as these, whose body language reveals how crippling the life of secondary satisfaction finally is.
Who pays for it, in the end? They do, of course; secondary satisfaction, by definition, misses the whole point of life. Such people look like heroes; the truth is that they are victims. But the real losers in this game are the victims of the victims, as it were: three million people, in the case of Vietnam, for example. What the civilian death toll might be in Iraq, should war come to pass, is as yet unclear. It is hardly the best way to begin the twenty-first century; but as long as the denial of the body is the central motif of our existence, we shall continue to make others suffer—and die—for the lives we are ultimately afraid to live.
©Morris Berman, 2002
3701 Connecticut Ave NW #618
Washington DC 20008
USA
Of course, one of the problems with Reich is that he construed the idea of the repression of erotic life much too narrowly. As I argue in my book, Cuerpo y Espiritu: La historia oculta de occidente, eros—the life of the body—is not just about sex. The ability to breathe deeply, to feel the sun on one’s cheek, even to smell the strong aroma of coffee in a Barcelona café—all of these things are avenues into our emotional life. They bespeak a world of primary satisfaction. The notion that there can be a life of the mind separate from the body is a Puritan fantasy, and it has done the human race untold harm. It leads to a world of secondary satisfaction, a world of substitute satisfactions that we normally call “addictions”. This includes psychological “drugs” as well as chemical ones, and in this category we can put the lust for power, for control, for violence itself. War is a heady wine; it enables us to get high not only from rage and destruction, but from the self-righteousness, the phony moral indignation, that is used to justify this behavior.
Why would the United States suddenly want to go to war with Iraq, especially when the latter has no clear tie to the Al Qaeda network, and when the CIA has bluntly told President Bush that Saddam Hussein is less of a threat left alone than if attacked? As a number of scholars and journalists have pointed out, this war—if it indeed comes to pass—is not really about Iraq as a political opponent or about its alleged weapons of mass destruction. More significant is the American desire to take over Iraqi oil fields, as well as the the intention of having a controlling (military) presence in the Middle East—a key feature of America’s plans for global hegemony. But there is a hidden dimension to all of this, I believe, where the life of the body needs to get factored into the equation. The former American president, Jimmy Carter, alluded to this in an essay he wrote for the Washington Post several weeks before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Remarking that “there is no current danger to the United States from Baghdad,” Carter said that war fever was being fomented by “a core group of conservatives trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.”
I do not wish to make too much out of this; it is easy to get seduced by a kind of psychological reductionism. War, as we all know, is a complex phenomenon; it cannot be attributed to a single cause, and I am not making any such claim. But Carter’s remark does beg the obvious question: Where do these pent-up ambitions come from? Reading Nicholas Lemann’s descriptions of Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (New Yorker, 7 May 2001; 14/21 October 2002)—to take only two members of the pro-war team—one is struck by how “out of touch” these individuals are. Nothing, or so it would seem, could be more lacking in their lives than an awareness of the body and its emotions. Cheney’s perfectionism is so legendary, and his anger so rigidly under control, that he has suffered a string of heart attacks as a result. Watching him on television, one has the impression of someone barely able to conceal his contempt, his posture of virtuous inflexibility. As for Ms. Rice, the picture that emerges is one of a life that is extremely “successful,” at the cost of her having no loves and no real friends. In television interviews, she tends to talk in clichés, and of a black-and-white world of good vs. evil. There is a terrible sadness to people such as these, whose body language reveals how crippling the life of secondary satisfaction finally is.
Who pays for it, in the end? They do, of course; secondary satisfaction, by definition, misses the whole point of life. Such people look like heroes; the truth is that they are victims. But the real losers in this game are the victims of the victims, as it were: three million people, in the case of Vietnam, for example. What the civilian death toll might be in Iraq, should war come to pass, is as yet unclear. It is hardly the best way to begin the twenty-first century; but as long as the denial of the body is the central motif of our existence, we shall continue to make others suffer—and die—for the lives we are ultimately afraid to live.
©Morris Berman, 2002
3701 Connecticut Ave NW #618
Washington DC 20008
USA
A Force that Gives Us Meaning
(keynote address for a conference in Cali, Colombia, October 2005)
“They create a wasteland and they call it peace.”–Tacitus, 1st century A.D.
Sometimes I think it all began when the human race sat down. Pascal wrote that the hardest thing in the world for a human being to do was to sit quietly in a room. He was right, of course, but that is probably because we weren’t meant to sit quietly in a room. We were designed to move, to walk, and for hundreds of millennia that’s what Homo sapiens did. Not just coincidentally, war does not show up in the archaeological record until the Late Paleolithic–say, about 15,000 B.C. Conflict and aggression, of course, were always with us; but systematic, organized conflict and aggression–war, in short–is a relatively recent phenomenon, and coincides with the beginnings of sedentism, urbanism, religion, and social inequality (also known as politics). In one form or another, human beings have been doing pretty much the same thing since the Neolithic era.
It also has a lot to do with where we locate meaning. “The mystery of the world is the visible,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “not the invisible.” Frank Lloyd Wright said that his god was Nature, which he spelled with a capital N. For the hunter-gatherer, the visible world was not some mysterious code, imbued with hidden meaning, which we had been placed on the earth to figure out. Rather, the world as it presented itself was its own meaning. “Meaning” becomes an issue only if you believe something is being withheld; if there is no mystery, if what you see is what you get, then “meaning” is a nonissue and you can just live your life. When life itself is not enough, that’s when problems arise.
If life itself is not enough, if you are convinced that there is a hidden meaning somewhere that you need to uncover in order to feel all right, then you are caught in what I call the “Neolithic dilemma”: there is a hole in the soul, and something out there, somewhere, is going to fill it up. For some people that something is alcohol; for others, fame or wealth. Many pursue romantic love; others try to lose themselves in work. But the one activity guaranteed to fill the void (for a while, at least) is war. “War,” as the American journalist Chris Hedges recently wrote, “is a force that gives us meaning.” There is something intoxicating about going to war; it has an erotic feel to it that is dizzying in its intensity. Who can forget the image of the actor Slim Pickins, in Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove, riding a nuclear warhead like a cowboy on a bronco and shouting “yahoo!” as the bomb descended to oblivion? In many ways, war is the ultimate religion, and it is no accident that religion has been the cause of so many wars.
One thing religion does, or has a tendency to do, is split the world into Good and Evil; a mental framework sometimes referred to as “Manichaean.” Manichaeanism makes things very convenient for us; at the very least, you don’t really have to think a lot, which can be an enormous relief. But even beyond that, it enables us to harden our ego boundaries; to fill ourselves with anger, rage, or self-righteous virtue, and thus never have to look at the secret parts of ourselves that are fearful, that hurt, that make us feel ashamed. In his book The Forgiving Self, psychologist Robert Karen writes:
The binary, black-and-white mentality offers the shelter
of simplicity. There are good behaviors, bad behaviors;
good people, bad people; right thinking, wrong thinking;
righteous nations, wicked nations. The potential to live
[this way] . . . represents a significant part of our psychic
life, for many people the most significant part. It is
associated with blaming, revenge-seeking, scapegoating,
xenophobia, warmongering, the draconian treatment of
prisoners, as well as idol worship, cult phenomena,
religions of the “one true faith,” and chauvinism.
Another word for this is “paranoia,” the etymology of which is very interesting. In Greek, it means “like knowledge”–i.e., that which is not genuine knowledge but nevertheless resembles it in structure. Illusion, in short. War requires a lot of illusion; in particular, the belief that the problem is entirely “out there.”
One of the best illustrations of this phenomenon in recent times, at least to my mind, is Ronald Reagan. No complexities in the world for him: the United States was “the city on the hill,” the Soviet Union “the evil empire”–end of discussion. Well, I never thought much of the Soviet Union myself; it was certainly no place I ever wanted to live. But by the time the Vietnam war was over, it had become clear to many Americans–at least for a brief moment in time–that our house was not exactly in order either. The war in Vietnam was a lie; it had no purpose beyond its own perpetuation; we had killed literally millions of innocent civilians; and the perpetrators of the war, including Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, were unable to say why we were there because they didn’t know themselves. Financially, in terms of both military and subsequent social costs, the war is estimated to have set the United States back two-thirds of a trillion dollars (in 1967 dollars, no less); as for the spiritual cost of the war, that is incalculable. It tore the nation apart; political scientist George Modelski, in Long Cycles in World Politics, dates the period 1971-75 as the beginning of the end of the American empire.
It was on the wings of this debacle that Jimmy Carter was elected to office, in 1976. President Carter understood the spiritual cost of the war; he told the American public that the country had gone astray, that the time had come for some serious soul-searching. The time was over, he said, for finding fault on the outside; we needed now to look within ourselves, look at the way we were living. As I said, it was a very brief moment; the temptations of the binary, Manichaean world view were too powerful to resist. By the time Mr. Carter delivered his famous “spiritual malaise” speech in 1979, the American public was done with self-reflection and ready to get on with business as usual, i.e. blame the enemy. Ronald Reagan, a simple-minded actor with a clear black-and-white formula, came along at just the right time, enabling the country to return to the stupor of denial. In the 1980 election, he won by a landslide; and in Republican circles to this day, the Carter presidency is ridiculed as a joke, as the epitome of weakness, when in reality just the reverse is true: Mr. Reagan’s bellicosity was weakness disguised, and Mr. Carter’s attempt at soul-searching the real strength.
And the Neolithic drama never ends. War serves too many psychological purposes for us to let go of it. “Our world,” writes Robert Karen, “is full of people who thrive on power and acclamation and feel empty and worthless without it.” Two and a half years ago, on the eve of the war in Iraq, Jimmy Carter published a short article calling the venture a mistake, and asserting that it was the work of a few individuals in the White House and the Pentagon who had never resolved their own frustrated, pent-up ambitions. As Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, later admitted, the “neoconservative” crowd was never really concerned about any purported weapons of mass destruction. Rather, he said, the inner circle simply agreed that this was the best way to sell the war to the American people, and they were going to have this war come hell or high water. The result, as is now plain to see, is a mess: Shias and Sunnis are united for the first time in their history (by their hatred for the U.S.); the Bush administration vows to “stay the course,” without being able to say exactly what that course is; we are again bogged down in what may prove to be another Vietnam-type situation; nearly 2,000 American soldiers have died, and according to a study done by the Johns Hopkins University in late 2004, so have about 100,000 Iraqi civilians; and the spiritual and financial cost is once again increasing exponentially. Asked by reporters at his April, 2004 press conference whether he felt he had ever made a mistake, the Manichaean “president of good and evil,” as the philosopher Peter Singer calls Mr. Bush, was nonplused: apparently, the possibility had never occurred to him.
It’s not that the United States can go on forever; no nation, no civilization, can. The choices now open to us, as the historian Immanuel Wallerstein recently wrote, are to decline rapidly or to decline gradually; there are no other options, much as Americans would like to believe the contrary. At this point in U.S. history, when our hegemonic strength is really a mirage, to foment war–especially a phony, let alone colonial, one–is to put ourselves firmly on the path of rapid decline. The alternative, brilliantly spelled out by W.H. Auden many years ago, is by now tragically foreclosed; but it does go to the heart of what it means to be a human being—a crucial part of what the human struggle is about. Auden wrote:
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
– Morris Berman, Cali, Colombia, October 2005
“They create a wasteland and they call it peace.”–Tacitus, 1st century A.D.
Sometimes I think it all began when the human race sat down. Pascal wrote that the hardest thing in the world for a human being to do was to sit quietly in a room. He was right, of course, but that is probably because we weren’t meant to sit quietly in a room. We were designed to move, to walk, and for hundreds of millennia that’s what Homo sapiens did. Not just coincidentally, war does not show up in the archaeological record until the Late Paleolithic–say, about 15,000 B.C. Conflict and aggression, of course, were always with us; but systematic, organized conflict and aggression–war, in short–is a relatively recent phenomenon, and coincides with the beginnings of sedentism, urbanism, religion, and social inequality (also known as politics). In one form or another, human beings have been doing pretty much the same thing since the Neolithic era.
It also has a lot to do with where we locate meaning. “The mystery of the world is the visible,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “not the invisible.” Frank Lloyd Wright said that his god was Nature, which he spelled with a capital N. For the hunter-gatherer, the visible world was not some mysterious code, imbued with hidden meaning, which we had been placed on the earth to figure out. Rather, the world as it presented itself was its own meaning. “Meaning” becomes an issue only if you believe something is being withheld; if there is no mystery, if what you see is what you get, then “meaning” is a nonissue and you can just live your life. When life itself is not enough, that’s when problems arise.
If life itself is not enough, if you are convinced that there is a hidden meaning somewhere that you need to uncover in order to feel all right, then you are caught in what I call the “Neolithic dilemma”: there is a hole in the soul, and something out there, somewhere, is going to fill it up. For some people that something is alcohol; for others, fame or wealth. Many pursue romantic love; others try to lose themselves in work. But the one activity guaranteed to fill the void (for a while, at least) is war. “War,” as the American journalist Chris Hedges recently wrote, “is a force that gives us meaning.” There is something intoxicating about going to war; it has an erotic feel to it that is dizzying in its intensity. Who can forget the image of the actor Slim Pickins, in Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove, riding a nuclear warhead like a cowboy on a bronco and shouting “yahoo!” as the bomb descended to oblivion? In many ways, war is the ultimate religion, and it is no accident that religion has been the cause of so many wars.
One thing religion does, or has a tendency to do, is split the world into Good and Evil; a mental framework sometimes referred to as “Manichaean.” Manichaeanism makes things very convenient for us; at the very least, you don’t really have to think a lot, which can be an enormous relief. But even beyond that, it enables us to harden our ego boundaries; to fill ourselves with anger, rage, or self-righteous virtue, and thus never have to look at the secret parts of ourselves that are fearful, that hurt, that make us feel ashamed. In his book The Forgiving Self, psychologist Robert Karen writes:
The binary, black-and-white mentality offers the shelter
of simplicity. There are good behaviors, bad behaviors;
good people, bad people; right thinking, wrong thinking;
righteous nations, wicked nations. The potential to live
[this way] . . . represents a significant part of our psychic
life, for many people the most significant part. It is
associated with blaming, revenge-seeking, scapegoating,
xenophobia, warmongering, the draconian treatment of
prisoners, as well as idol worship, cult phenomena,
religions of the “one true faith,” and chauvinism.
Another word for this is “paranoia,” the etymology of which is very interesting. In Greek, it means “like knowledge”–i.e., that which is not genuine knowledge but nevertheless resembles it in structure. Illusion, in short. War requires a lot of illusion; in particular, the belief that the problem is entirely “out there.”
One of the best illustrations of this phenomenon in recent times, at least to my mind, is Ronald Reagan. No complexities in the world for him: the United States was “the city on the hill,” the Soviet Union “the evil empire”–end of discussion. Well, I never thought much of the Soviet Union myself; it was certainly no place I ever wanted to live. But by the time the Vietnam war was over, it had become clear to many Americans–at least for a brief moment in time–that our house was not exactly in order either. The war in Vietnam was a lie; it had no purpose beyond its own perpetuation; we had killed literally millions of innocent civilians; and the perpetrators of the war, including Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, were unable to say why we were there because they didn’t know themselves. Financially, in terms of both military and subsequent social costs, the war is estimated to have set the United States back two-thirds of a trillion dollars (in 1967 dollars, no less); as for the spiritual cost of the war, that is incalculable. It tore the nation apart; political scientist George Modelski, in Long Cycles in World Politics, dates the period 1971-75 as the beginning of the end of the American empire.
It was on the wings of this debacle that Jimmy Carter was elected to office, in 1976. President Carter understood the spiritual cost of the war; he told the American public that the country had gone astray, that the time had come for some serious soul-searching. The time was over, he said, for finding fault on the outside; we needed now to look within ourselves, look at the way we were living. As I said, it was a very brief moment; the temptations of the binary, Manichaean world view were too powerful to resist. By the time Mr. Carter delivered his famous “spiritual malaise” speech in 1979, the American public was done with self-reflection and ready to get on with business as usual, i.e. blame the enemy. Ronald Reagan, a simple-minded actor with a clear black-and-white formula, came along at just the right time, enabling the country to return to the stupor of denial. In the 1980 election, he won by a landslide; and in Republican circles to this day, the Carter presidency is ridiculed as a joke, as the epitome of weakness, when in reality just the reverse is true: Mr. Reagan’s bellicosity was weakness disguised, and Mr. Carter’s attempt at soul-searching the real strength.
And the Neolithic drama never ends. War serves too many psychological purposes for us to let go of it. “Our world,” writes Robert Karen, “is full of people who thrive on power and acclamation and feel empty and worthless without it.” Two and a half years ago, on the eve of the war in Iraq, Jimmy Carter published a short article calling the venture a mistake, and asserting that it was the work of a few individuals in the White House and the Pentagon who had never resolved their own frustrated, pent-up ambitions. As Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, later admitted, the “neoconservative” crowd was never really concerned about any purported weapons of mass destruction. Rather, he said, the inner circle simply agreed that this was the best way to sell the war to the American people, and they were going to have this war come hell or high water. The result, as is now plain to see, is a mess: Shias and Sunnis are united for the first time in their history (by their hatred for the U.S.); the Bush administration vows to “stay the course,” without being able to say exactly what that course is; we are again bogged down in what may prove to be another Vietnam-type situation; nearly 2,000 American soldiers have died, and according to a study done by the Johns Hopkins University in late 2004, so have about 100,000 Iraqi civilians; and the spiritual and financial cost is once again increasing exponentially. Asked by reporters at his April, 2004 press conference whether he felt he had ever made a mistake, the Manichaean “president of good and evil,” as the philosopher Peter Singer calls Mr. Bush, was nonplused: apparently, the possibility had never occurred to him.
It’s not that the United States can go on forever; no nation, no civilization, can. The choices now open to us, as the historian Immanuel Wallerstein recently wrote, are to decline rapidly or to decline gradually; there are no other options, much as Americans would like to believe the contrary. At this point in U.S. history, when our hegemonic strength is really a mirage, to foment war–especially a phony, let alone colonial, one–is to put ourselves firmly on the path of rapid decline. The alternative, brilliantly spelled out by W.H. Auden many years ago, is by now tragically foreclosed; but it does go to the heart of what it means to be a human being—a crucial part of what the human struggle is about. Auden wrote:
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
– Morris Berman, Cali, Colombia, October 2005
April 15, 2006
Waiting for the Barbarians
A once-great empire, Rome fell into catastrophic cultural and economic decline. Morris Berman on chilling parallels with modern America
Morris Berman
Saturday October 6, 2001
The Guardian
When I wrote my recent book, The Twilight of American Culture, my focus was on what might be called "inner" barbarism, the structural factors endemic to American society that were, I believed, bringing about its disintegration.
The contemporary American situation could be compared to that of Rome in the Late Empire period, and the factors involved in the process of decline in each case are pretty much the same: a steadily widening gap between rich and poor; declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organisational solutions to socioeconomic problems (in the US, dwindling funds for social security and medicare); rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness; and what might be called "spiritual death": apathy, cynicism, political corruption, loss of public spirit, and the repackaging of cultural content (eg "democracy") as slogans and formulas.
What I overlooked, however, was perhaps the most obvious point of comparison; obvious, at least, with the benefit of hindsight. This is the factor of external barbarism, destruction from without. The events of September 11 brought that possibility home, in stark relief.
In the case of Rome, the historical outline is clear enough. The Goths began pressing against the border of the Roman empire from the late third century, and scored a decisive victory in AD 378, when Roman legions were resoundingly defeated at Adrianople. "The battle", wrote historian Solomon Katz, "did more than expose the weakness of Rome to the barbarians and encourage them to return to the attack again and again, for never afterward did they leave Roman soil". From that time on, siege and potential invasion became facts of Roman life. The Visigoth leader Alaric invaded Italy in 401, and finally captured and sacked Rome in 410. The city was further sacked by the Vandals in 455, and in 476 barbarian mercenaries deposed the last Roman emperor and put the Germanic chieftain Odoacer on the throne, making him king of the western empire.
America, too, now has barbarians at the gates, and also, it would seem, within them. It, too, is committed to a war to the finish, "total victory", defined by President Bush as the point at which there are no longer any terrorist organisations capable of international reach - which some would say is a formula for permanent war. One photograph of the shell of the World Trade Centre eerily resembles pictures of the Roman Coliseum. But there are many more concrete similarities between the invasion of Rome and the attack on America. As American military personnel have recently suggested, September 11 is not likely to be the end of it. The US can expect further terrorist attacks on its soil.
More poignant, the destruction of the WTC showed that America is not invincible. In the case of Adrianople, things were never the same thereafter. The sharks smelled blood, and they kept coming back. America can expect something similar. (Note also that just as the barbarians used Rome's excellent network of roads to mount their invasions, so did the terrorists of September 11 use America's aviation schools, banking systems, internet accessibility and the like to mount theirs.) The response of the empire is to regard the attackers as the ultimate Other. ("Barbarian", comes from an ancient Greek anecdote, that those who couldn't speak Greek just uttered strange sounds - "bar bar" - that didn't amount to a real language.) In the main, the Romans had no understanding of non civilisation: of different values, nomadic ways of life.
Similarly, America views Islamic terrorism as completely irrational; there is no understanding of the political context of this activity, a context of American military attack on, or crippling economic sanctions against, a host of Arab nations - with unilateral support for Israel constituting the central, running sore.
Instead, the enemy is characterised as "jealous of our way of life", "hateful of freedom", and so on. Hence President Bush, no less than the Islamic terrorists, uses the language of religious war: we are on a "crusade"; the military operation was initially called "Infinite Justice"; and the enemy is "evil itself".
Along with this is the belief that the pax Romana/Americana is the only "reasonable" way to live. In the American case, we have a military and economic empire that views the world as one big happy market, and believes that everybody needs to come on board. We - that is, global corporate consumerism - are the future, "progress". If the "barbarians" fail to share this vision, they are "medieval"; if they resist, "evil". Most historians see a relationship, in the case of Rome, between its internal decay and its susceptibility to invasion. By the fourth century, if not much before, Rome had lost its central value, the legacy of Greek culture, and was effectively existing for the sake of military and administrative purposes. As it overextended itself, creating a huge standing army and a bloated military budget, the middle class began to disappear, and there was a reciprocal, reinforcing interaction between internal decadence and instability on the one hand, and external vulnerability on the other. I n the case of the United States, the nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life. It is hardly an accident that the terrorists' targets were the WTC, symbol of American global finance, and the Pentagon (although the White House was apparently the original target in this case). Consider how remarkable, even bizarre, it would have been if the terrorists had selected instead the Jefferson memorial and Columbia University. But the latter no longer represent the United States; Wall Street does. What is likely to happen, as obtained in the case of Rome, is increasing budgetary appropriations for military expenditures, leaving (in the American case) fewer and fewer funds for education, the rebuilding of cities, health care and social welfare. As in the case of American involvement in Vietnam, this could eventually bleed the country morally and financially.
In addition, military action versus Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Arab nations will sow the seeds of more intifadas. By the third century, nearly every Roman denarius collected in taxes was going into military and administrative maintenance, to the point that the state was drifting towards bankruptcy. The denarius, which had a silver content of 92% in Nero's reign (AD 54-68) was down to 43% silver by the early third century. The third century saw even greater increases in the size of the army and the government bureaucracy, followed by further debasement of the coinage and enormous inflation. The standing army rose from 300,000 troops in AD 235 to about 600,000 a mere 70 years later. By the time the fifth century rolled around, Rome was an empire in name only. Spiritual and intellectual collapse were unavoidable in such a demoralised context, expecially because the economic life of the cities was virtually destroyed.
For centuries, the aim had been to hellenise or romanise the rest of the population - to pass on the learning and ideals of Greco-Roman civilisation. But as the economic crisis deepened, a new mentality arose among the masses, one based on religion, which was hostile to the achievements of higher culture.
In addition, as in contemporary America, the new "intellectual" efforts were designed to cater to the masses, until intellectual life was brought down to the lowest common denominator. This, according to the great historian of Rome, MI Rostovtzeff, was the most conspicuous feature in the development of the ancient world during the imperial age: primitive forms of life finally drowning out the higher ones. For civilisation is impossible without a hierarchy of quality, and as soon as that gets flattened into a mass phenomenon, its days are numbered. "The main phenomenon which underlies the process of decline," wrote Rostovtzeff, "is the gradual absorption of the educated classes by the masses and the consequent simplification of all the functions of political, social, economic, and intellectual life, which we call the barbarisation of the ancient world."
Religion played a critical role in these developments. By the third century, if not before, there was an attitude among many Christians that education was not relevant to salvation, and that ignorance had a positive spiritual value (an early version of Forrest Gump, one might say). The third century saw a sharp increase in mysticism and a belief in knowledge by revelation. Charles Radding, in A World Made By Men, argues that the cognitive ability of comparing different viewpoints or perspectives (quite evident in Augustine's Confessions, for example) had disappeared by the sixth century. Even by the fourth century, he says, what little that had survived from Greek and Roman philosophy was confused with magic and superstition (much as we see in today's new age beliefs or in the so-called philosophy section of many bookstores). Only a warped version of the classical culture of antiquity remained. "Short of the mass destruction of the libraries", writes Radding, "a more complete collapse of a classical civilisation is hard to imagine."
And so the proverbial lights went out in western Europe. The parallels with contemporary America are not identical, but they do seem disturbing. The factors of hype, ignorance, potential bankruptcy and extreme social inequality are overwhelming, and they make a kind of spiritual death - apathy and classicist formalism - ultimately unavoidable.
The phrase "Twilight of American Culture", however, implies an eventual dawn, and at some point we are going to emerge from our contemporary twilight and future darkness, if only because no historical configuration is the end of history. After centuries of stagnation, the culture of the Latin west became a viable option once more, thanks to the medieval monasteries, especially Irish ones, which began to stow away nuggets of intellectual achievement from Roman civilisation.
That, however, is a whole other story. In terms of the current American situation, recovery at the external level probably depends on a reconsideration of American foreign policy but also a reconsideration of internal purposes. The United States does not seem to grasp the impact of its current foreign policy on the have-nots of this world. Without such an understanding, an Israeli-style scenario would seem to be inevitable: a garrison state, and a condition of endless siege. It is a chilling thought, the possibility that for the remainder of the new century, America will be waiting for the barbarians.
-- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
Morris Berman
Saturday October 6, 2001
The Guardian
When I wrote my recent book, The Twilight of American Culture, my focus was on what might be called "inner" barbarism, the structural factors endemic to American society that were, I believed, bringing about its disintegration.
The contemporary American situation could be compared to that of Rome in the Late Empire period, and the factors involved in the process of decline in each case are pretty much the same: a steadily widening gap between rich and poor; declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organisational solutions to socioeconomic problems (in the US, dwindling funds for social security and medicare); rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness; and what might be called "spiritual death": apathy, cynicism, political corruption, loss of public spirit, and the repackaging of cultural content (eg "democracy") as slogans and formulas.
What I overlooked, however, was perhaps the most obvious point of comparison; obvious, at least, with the benefit of hindsight. This is the factor of external barbarism, destruction from without. The events of September 11 brought that possibility home, in stark relief.
In the case of Rome, the historical outline is clear enough. The Goths began pressing against the border of the Roman empire from the late third century, and scored a decisive victory in AD 378, when Roman legions were resoundingly defeated at Adrianople. "The battle", wrote historian Solomon Katz, "did more than expose the weakness of Rome to the barbarians and encourage them to return to the attack again and again, for never afterward did they leave Roman soil". From that time on, siege and potential invasion became facts of Roman life. The Visigoth leader Alaric invaded Italy in 401, and finally captured and sacked Rome in 410. The city was further sacked by the Vandals in 455, and in 476 barbarian mercenaries deposed the last Roman emperor and put the Germanic chieftain Odoacer on the throne, making him king of the western empire.
America, too, now has barbarians at the gates, and also, it would seem, within them. It, too, is committed to a war to the finish, "total victory", defined by President Bush as the point at which there are no longer any terrorist organisations capable of international reach - which some would say is a formula for permanent war. One photograph of the shell of the World Trade Centre eerily resembles pictures of the Roman Coliseum. But there are many more concrete similarities between the invasion of Rome and the attack on America. As American military personnel have recently suggested, September 11 is not likely to be the end of it. The US can expect further terrorist attacks on its soil.
More poignant, the destruction of the WTC showed that America is not invincible. In the case of Adrianople, things were never the same thereafter. The sharks smelled blood, and they kept coming back. America can expect something similar. (Note also that just as the barbarians used Rome's excellent network of roads to mount their invasions, so did the terrorists of September 11 use America's aviation schools, banking systems, internet accessibility and the like to mount theirs.) The response of the empire is to regard the attackers as the ultimate Other. ("Barbarian", comes from an ancient Greek anecdote, that those who couldn't speak Greek just uttered strange sounds - "bar bar" - that didn't amount to a real language.) In the main, the Romans had no understanding of non civilisation: of different values, nomadic ways of life.
Similarly, America views Islamic terrorism as completely irrational; there is no understanding of the political context of this activity, a context of American military attack on, or crippling economic sanctions against, a host of Arab nations - with unilateral support for Israel constituting the central, running sore.
Instead, the enemy is characterised as "jealous of our way of life", "hateful of freedom", and so on. Hence President Bush, no less than the Islamic terrorists, uses the language of religious war: we are on a "crusade"; the military operation was initially called "Infinite Justice"; and the enemy is "evil itself".
Along with this is the belief that the pax Romana/Americana is the only "reasonable" way to live. In the American case, we have a military and economic empire that views the world as one big happy market, and believes that everybody needs to come on board. We - that is, global corporate consumerism - are the future, "progress". If the "barbarians" fail to share this vision, they are "medieval"; if they resist, "evil". Most historians see a relationship, in the case of Rome, between its internal decay and its susceptibility to invasion. By the fourth century, if not much before, Rome had lost its central value, the legacy of Greek culture, and was effectively existing for the sake of military and administrative purposes. As it overextended itself, creating a huge standing army and a bloated military budget, the middle class began to disappear, and there was a reciprocal, reinforcing interaction between internal decadence and instability on the one hand, and external vulnerability on the other. I n the case of the United States, the nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life. It is hardly an accident that the terrorists' targets were the WTC, symbol of American global finance, and the Pentagon (although the White House was apparently the original target in this case). Consider how remarkable, even bizarre, it would have been if the terrorists had selected instead the Jefferson memorial and Columbia University. But the latter no longer represent the United States; Wall Street does. What is likely to happen, as obtained in the case of Rome, is increasing budgetary appropriations for military expenditures, leaving (in the American case) fewer and fewer funds for education, the rebuilding of cities, health care and social welfare. As in the case of American involvement in Vietnam, this could eventually bleed the country morally and financially.
In addition, military action versus Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Arab nations will sow the seeds of more intifadas. By the third century, nearly every Roman denarius collected in taxes was going into military and administrative maintenance, to the point that the state was drifting towards bankruptcy. The denarius, which had a silver content of 92% in Nero's reign (AD 54-68) was down to 43% silver by the early third century. The third century saw even greater increases in the size of the army and the government bureaucracy, followed by further debasement of the coinage and enormous inflation. The standing army rose from 300,000 troops in AD 235 to about 600,000 a mere 70 years later. By the time the fifth century rolled around, Rome was an empire in name only. Spiritual and intellectual collapse were unavoidable in such a demoralised context, expecially because the economic life of the cities was virtually destroyed.
For centuries, the aim had been to hellenise or romanise the rest of the population - to pass on the learning and ideals of Greco-Roman civilisation. But as the economic crisis deepened, a new mentality arose among the masses, one based on religion, which was hostile to the achievements of higher culture.
In addition, as in contemporary America, the new "intellectual" efforts were designed to cater to the masses, until intellectual life was brought down to the lowest common denominator. This, according to the great historian of Rome, MI Rostovtzeff, was the most conspicuous feature in the development of the ancient world during the imperial age: primitive forms of life finally drowning out the higher ones. For civilisation is impossible without a hierarchy of quality, and as soon as that gets flattened into a mass phenomenon, its days are numbered. "The main phenomenon which underlies the process of decline," wrote Rostovtzeff, "is the gradual absorption of the educated classes by the masses and the consequent simplification of all the functions of political, social, economic, and intellectual life, which we call the barbarisation of the ancient world."
Religion played a critical role in these developments. By the third century, if not before, there was an attitude among many Christians that education was not relevant to salvation, and that ignorance had a positive spiritual value (an early version of Forrest Gump, one might say). The third century saw a sharp increase in mysticism and a belief in knowledge by revelation. Charles Radding, in A World Made By Men, argues that the cognitive ability of comparing different viewpoints or perspectives (quite evident in Augustine's Confessions, for example) had disappeared by the sixth century. Even by the fourth century, he says, what little that had survived from Greek and Roman philosophy was confused with magic and superstition (much as we see in today's new age beliefs or in the so-called philosophy section of many bookstores). Only a warped version of the classical culture of antiquity remained. "Short of the mass destruction of the libraries", writes Radding, "a more complete collapse of a classical civilisation is hard to imagine."
And so the proverbial lights went out in western Europe. The parallels with contemporary America are not identical, but they do seem disturbing. The factors of hype, ignorance, potential bankruptcy and extreme social inequality are overwhelming, and they make a kind of spiritual death - apathy and classicist formalism - ultimately unavoidable.
The phrase "Twilight of American Culture", however, implies an eventual dawn, and at some point we are going to emerge from our contemporary twilight and future darkness, if only because no historical configuration is the end of history. After centuries of stagnation, the culture of the Latin west became a viable option once more, thanks to the medieval monasteries, especially Irish ones, which began to stow away nuggets of intellectual achievement from Roman civilisation.
That, however, is a whole other story. In terms of the current American situation, recovery at the external level probably depends on a reconsideration of American foreign policy but also a reconsideration of internal purposes. The United States does not seem to grasp the impact of its current foreign policy on the have-nots of this world. Without such an understanding, an Israeli-style scenario would seem to be inevitable: a garrison state, and a condition of endless siege. It is a chilling thought, the possibility that for the remainder of the new century, America will be waiting for the barbarians.
-- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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