Dear Friends:
Here's the sequel to the "Conspiracy" article, posted below. There will be one more in the series, which I'll post in a few days (stay tuned). Both of these were/will be posted at www.bestcyrano.org.
Rope-a-Dope: The Chump Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy*
In my previous article (posted at Cyrano’s Online Journal on 24 November 2008), I wrote about the unconscious mythologies, or “Conspiracies,” that have guided U.S. foreign policy for a long time now. Chief among these is the belief, going back to 1630, that America is God’s chosen nation, a “city on a hill,” put on this earth for other countries to learn from and emulate. It is not too much to say that the vast majority of Americans are under the impression that everyone on earth, in their heart of hearts, harbors the hope of becoming an American some day, and that it is the sacred mission of the U.S. to bring the American Way of Life to all the peoples of the world.
Looking at such a belief-system from the outside, it comes off as being not merely arrogant, but frankly demented; and yet, it really is what most Americans believe. In this regard, it is supported by a second mythology, that of the “civil religion” of the United States, whereby what is actually worshiped is the nation itself. Taken together, these two “Conspiracies” have an enormous hold on the American psyche, leading to a kind of national blindness in U.S. foreign policy. In particular, they set Americans up to be chumps, and most nations of the world learned long ago that the way to deal with Washington is simply to tell it what it wants to hear. “Though Americans rarely discuss their national tendency to credulousness,” writes the Irish journalist Eamonn Fingleton, “it is a fact of life that is well understood by tricksters and con men around the world.” This holds true even for America’s Anglo-Saxon allies, such as Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations, for whom the naïveté of Americans is legendary. We can expect, then, that it would be even truer for the countries of East Asia, as Fingleton describes it in his illuminating book, In the Jaws of the Dragon.
As a prime example of this, Fingleton recounts the story of postwar Japan. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, head of the occupying forces there, sought to “Americanize” the Japanese, get them to embrace Western capitalism and democracy. That he succeeded remains, to this day, part of the U.S. national mythology. In MacArthur’s view, democracy was irresistible, and one year after his arrival he spoke of a “spiritual revolution” that “ensued almost overnight,” reversing 2,000 years of Japanese tradition. “This revolution of the spirit among the Japanese people represents no thin veneer to serve the purposes of the present,” he proudly declared.
But of course, a thin veneer was exactly what it represented. What MacArthur failed to grasp was that a few months’ contact with friendly American GI’s was not enough to bring about such a cultural miracle. In fact, the Japanese were very clever in deflecting MacArthur’s attempts to impose American values upon them, and they were able to do this because they understood that he was a chump. They recognized quite quickly that he was vain and self-absorbed, so they treated him like an emperor–which worked like a charm. A similar type of flattery was also effective with other top U.S. officials stationed in Japan. These men were completely ignorant of this very old civilization, of its history and its psychology, and yet saw themselves as capable of miraculously transforming it. After all, how could the Japanese not want to be Americans? To this day Americans believe that it is only a matter of time before non-Western nations come around to American values.**
The problem was that the Americans had to work through Japanese officials to bring about the reforms they sought. These officials rarely said no, but were adept at scuttling any such initiatives. The expression for this in Japanese is menju fukuhai–to cooperate with the face, but disobey with the belly. Hence the Japanese worked hard to make relations with the Americans as smooth as possible, on the surface, and cooperated with them on many unimportant issues. But behind the smiles was a deep bitterness over the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which caused the grisly deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
It proved easy to play the Americans for fools. Right under MacArthur’s nose, the Japanese created a cosmetic, democratic persona, writes Fingleton, a pseudo-democracy that was presented to outsiders as the real thing. Meanwhile, Japan’s elite bureaucrats quietly arranged sweeping powers for themselves, enabling them to rule from behind the scenes. The reality of postwar Japan has been a semi- authoritarian society with a nationalist agenda, not an American-style democracy. So while the Americans saw postwar Japan as a showcase of capitalism, the truth is that it had features such as a system of lifetime employment and a government-controlled banking industry. Contrary to MacArthur’s claim, it was very much a “thin veneer to serve the purposes of the present.”
And of the future as well. The fact is that the Japanese were in it for the long haul, and now, as creditors to a debtor nation, they underwrite a wasteful and self-indulgent lifestyle that they could cripple quite severely, if they chose to do so. Indeed, by the end of last year Japan was the major purchaser of U.S. Treasury bills, to the tune of nearly 1.2 trillion dollars.
If Japan managed to exploit the chump factor in American foreign policy quite brilliantly, China can be said to have elevated the rope-a-dope technique to an art. Fingleton points out that the belief in Washington (following the mythology of universal democracy) has been, for many years now, that as China prospers it will become more democratic. China lets the U.S. believe whatever it wants, but the truth is just the opposite: China is getting rich because it is authoritarian, because it is opposed to Western values and to the notion of a laissez-faire market economy. The Chinese economic system is rather one of state capitalism run by iron bureaucratic control, and involving a labyrinthine system of trade barriers, an artificially undervalued currency, and widespread institutionalized bribery–a “shark tank,” as one China-watcher has called it. Writing in Newsweek magazine (19 January 2009), Rana Foroohar says that this is a place “where the state doctors statistics, manipulates the stock markets, fixes prices in key industries, owns many strategic industries outright, and staffs key bank posts with Communist Party members.” While pundits such as Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama continue to believe that Western logic is universal and will eventually sweep the world, and the Wall Street Journal proclaims that the Asian nations are “racing to build an American-style consumer economy,” the Chinese use this kind of American self-deception as a cover for their own non-Western agenda. For Chinese society follows a very different set of rules, ones partly derived from Confucius, in which ideology counts for nothing and results count for everything. In this system, the end justifies the means all the time; “truth” is not a matter of great concern. In the Confucian scheme of things, the “truth” is merely contextual–you just say what is appropriate in the circumstances, not what actually is the case. This is what, from a Western point of view, would be called amoral, but the Chinese see it as simply pragmatic. Deng Xiaoping, who was the de facto leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1978 to the early 1990s, captured the attitude succinctly when he remarked, “It doesn’t matter if a cat is white or black, as long as it catches the mouse.” As for the masses, they are expected to exhibit obedience, loyalty, and self-sacrifice; nothing more. The key concept is “harmony”–true of Japanese society as well.
Western observers such as Friedman are regarded by the Chinese as preachy fools–like MacArthur, deeply self-absorbed and easily taken in by phony praise for writing the approved Chinese version of things. China will, for example, display a token openness, such as allowing Coca-Cola and McDonalds to set up shop there; but it is finally just PR, not something that alters the rules of the game in any substantive way. Playing the U.S. includes, for example, promising to open up the Chinese market to American companies...but then it turns out that there is a forest of red tape designed to slow the process down. In 2006, for example, foreign banks in China were restricted to narrow activities such as processing foreign currency loans and deposits. Fingleton points out that since the U.S. has always been convinced that the triumph of free-market ideology is just around the corner, it has, for decades, been a chump for a one-way free trade policy with the Confucian world. While China’s trade surplus with the U.S. was 10.4 billion dollars in 1990, fifteen years later it was up to 202 billion–the largest trade imbalance between any two nations in history. According to Le Monde diplomatique (November 2008), China holds 922 billion dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasury bills, and is sitting on the world’s largest dollar reserves–almost two trillion.
There are a few economists who, like Fingleton, see all this as deliberately planned. In the past decade China invested more than one trillion dollars in U.S. government bonds and government-backed mortgage debt, which served to lower interest rates and fuel the consumption binge in the United States. But clearly, borrowing from abroad for a consumption orgy at home is a formula for economic disaster; only a nation fogged over by The American Way of Life could fail to see that. Writing in the International Herald Tribune (27-28 December 2008), Mark Landler points out that the U.S. continues to be addicted to foreign creditors. Huge amounts of money will be needed to fund President Obama’s stimulus package, and the country will need China to keep buying that debt, thereby perpetuating the American habit of dependency and egregious consumption. The U.S. is so heavily indebted to China, says Fingleton, that the situation already looks like the relationship between a colony and an imperial capital. The political fallout from such an arrangement should be obvious: analysts at the U.S. Naval War College calculate that China will be equal to the United States as a military power in the Asia-Pacific region by the year 2020.
“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill,” wrote the Chinese military commander Sun Tzu, in the 6th century B.C. Around the same time, the Athenian statesman Solon was urging his audiences to “know thyself.” If America had managed to do the latter, it might not have become a sad illustration of the former.
*“Rope-a-Dope” is a term coined by the American boxer, Muhammad Ali, to describe a fighting style he used in matches against Joe Frazier and George Foreman (in the latter fight, in 1974, Ali regained the World Heavyweight Championship). It consists of assuming a protected stance and then lying against the ropes of the ring, allowing your opponent to exhaust himself attacking you; after which you move in for the kill. In general, the term is used to describe situations in which you put yourself in what appears to be a losing position, only to turn the tables later on. Barack Obama’s defeat of John McCain is widely regarded as an example of this strategy.
**However, Fingleton also believes that MacArthur was aware of the charade, but went along with it because he aspired to be the Republican candidate for president in the 1948 election. If true, this would lend a somewhat different interpretation to the events of postwar Japan, although the results would be the same.
©Morris Berman, 2009
February 05, 2009
November 16, 2008
These Are Your Neighbors (Part II)
Rest assured, it can only get worse:
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/106551
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/106551
November 13, 2008
conspiracy vs. Conspiracy in American History
The notion that the parliamentary democracy of the industrial nations is a sham, and that the real power lies not in the hands of the people (or their elected representatives) but in the hands of a small, ruling elite is a view most closely associated with Karl Marx. This is one meaning of the word “conspiracy”: the ruling class knows what its interests are, and it acts to protect them. In this sense of the term, conspiracy is equivalent to elite theory, because the implication is that the ruling class acts with a unified consciousness. Indeed, Marx argued that the emergence of conflicts within the ranks of the elite was a sign that the system was ripe for revolutionary overthrow.
Elite theory, then, holds that the people (or masses) are under the illusion that through their vote they control the direction of the ship of state, whereas the real captains of the ship–the captains of industry, the eminences grises–are not themselves on the ballot. The public does not get to vote for them, but rather for their paid representatives. Thus the post-election euphoria in the United States over Barack Obama is nothing more than a bubble, an illusion, because the lion’s share of the $750 million he collected in campaign contributions (according to the Australian journalist John Pilger) came from Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. These corporations, it hardly need be said, do not have the welfare of the American people as their top priority; and it is also the case that having invested in a president, they expect a return on their investment once he takes office. And if history is any guide here, they are going to get it. It is for this reason that what we have in the United States, according to Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel, is a “procedural democracy”: the form, the appearance, is democratic, but the actual content, the result, is not. As the eminent sociologist C. Wright Mills put it in 1956,
“In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the
political order, that clue is the decline of politics as genuine and
public debate of alternative decisions....America is now in considerable
part more a formal political democracy than a democratic social
structure, and even the formal political mechanics are weak.”
While it is undoubtedly true that elites occasionally act in a deliberate and concerted way, it was Mills in particular who pointed out that the reality was significantly more nuanced than this. For the most part, it is not that the rich or super-rich get together in some corporate boardroom and ask themselves, “Now how can we best screw the workers and the middle class?” No, said Mills, what in fact happens is that they socialize together, in an informal sort of way, and recognize their class affiliations:
“Members of the several higher circles know one another as personal
friends and even as neighbors; they mingle with one another on the
golf course, in the gentlemen’s clubs, at resorts, on transcontinental
airplanes, and on ocean liners. They meet at the estates of mutual
friends, face each other in front of the TV camera, or serve on the same
philanthropic committee; and many are sure to cross one another’s path
in the columns of newspapers, if not in the exact cafés from which many
of these columns originate....The conception of the power elite,
accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history
since the origins of World War II must be understood as a secret plot,
or as a great and co-ordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite.
The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds.”
We are not, in short, talking about some sort of organized brotherhood, some quasi-Masonic financial clique, as it were. However–and this is the crucial point–in terms of concrete outcome, we might as well be. Mills goes on:
“But, once the conjunction of structural trends and of the personal will
to utilize it gave rise to the power elite, then plans and programs did
occur to its members and indeed it is not possible to interpret many
events and official policies...without reference to the power elite.”
Mills’ work falls more into the category of social criticism than of social science per se; he was not big on facts and figures. But in the fifty-plus years since he wrote the above words, his profile of American democracy as illusory has been fleshed out by numerous sociologists and political scientists armed with reams of data. The most recent work in this genre, Superclass, by David Rothkopf, identifies a global elite of roughly 6,000 individuals who are running the show, worldwide, and the top fifty financial institutions that control nearly $50 trillion in assets. Plot or no plot, the results are the same.
This, then, is elite theory, or what I call conspiracy with a small “c”. And it is a real fact of political life, no question about it. But what may be even more significant than this are what I call Conspiracies with a capital “C”, by which I mean the unconscious mythologies, or isms, that govern American life. This was the thing that Marx, and Mills, both missed (though the Italian sociologist Antonio Gramsci did come close to it with his notion of “hegemony,” or the symbolic control of society): the elites aren’t doing anything that the masses don’t already agree with; which is why, certainly, in the United States, socialism never really had a chance. When Henry Wriston, who was president of the Council on Foreign Relations during 1951-64, wrote that U.S. foreign policy “is the expression of the will of the people,” he knew what he was talking about. As many observers (even American ones) have pointed out, what the American people–less than 5% of the world’s population–want is an indulgent and wasteful lifestyle, in which they consume 25% of the world’s energy. Thus in the presidential debates of October 2008, Barack Obama referred to the 25% figure, and then talked about ways of ensuring that that rate of consumption continue unchecked. He did not, as did Jimmy Carter more than thirty years ago, argue that growth was not necessarily a positive thing, that Americans needed to burn less energy, and that the American military–the guarantor of that profligate lifestyle–had to be scaled down accordingly. Indeed, within two years of taking office, Mr. Carter was popularly regarded as something of a joke, and by 1980 Ronald Reagan, who told the American people they could have it all, was elected by a landslide. (Significantly, the first thing he did upon moving into the White House was to have the solar panels that Mr. Carter had installed on the roof removed.) So while it is true that elites run the show, they nevertheless govern with the (misguided) consent of the people. As the nineteenth-century Sioux holy man, Chief Sitting Bull, was supposed to have said, “possessions are a disease with them.” But his was hardly the majority view–not then, not now.
What, then, are the major Conspiracies, or isms, of American life? I think we can identify four, in particular.
1. The notion of Americans as the “chosen people,” and of the nation as a “city on a hill.” This latter phrase–quoted by both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential campaign–goes back to the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, as he was sailing from England to America on the Arabella in 1630:
“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us....He shall
make us a praise and glory....For we must Consider that we
shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
The idea is that it would be America’s unique mission to bring democracy to all the peoples of the earth, inasmuch as the American way of life was (obviously) the best. (Iraq is merely the latest manifestation of this way of thinking.) In fact, the Puritans took the Jews of the Old Testament as their model, in which the exodus from Egypt, and invasion of Canaan, was regarded as the paradigm for the establishment of the Colonies. Cotton Mather even referred to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “our American Jerusalem.” The notion that the story of the United States is the primary manifestation of God’s will on earth has an enormous hold on the American psyche. “American exceptionalism,” Alexis de Tocqueville called it; it is with us to this day.
2. Along with this we have Ism No. 2: the existence, in the United States, of a “civil religion.” This was first pointed out by the sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967, the fact that despite the presence of Catholicism, Judaism, and numerous Protestant sects in America, the real religion of the American people was America itself. To be an American is regarded (unconsciously, by Americans) as an ideological/religious commitment, not an accident of birth. This is why critics of the US are immediately labeled “un-American,” and are practically regarded as traitors. (Quite ridiculous, when you think about it: can you imagine a Swedish critic of Sweden, for example, being attacked as “un-Swedish”?) The historian Sidney Mead pegged it correctly when he called America “the nation with the soul of a church,” while another historian, Richard Hofstadter, declared that “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.” As Graham Greene portrayed it in The Quiet American, this is not a position that encourages self-reflection.
3. The third unconscious mythology is the one identified by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893: the existence of a supposedly endless frontier, into which the American people would expand geographically. Eventually, it became an economic frontier, and finally an imperial one–Manifest Destiny gone global. This lay at the heart of the Carter-Reagan debate, for the notion of limits to growth is almost a form of heresy in an American context. The American Dream envisions a world without limits, in which the goal, as the gangster (played by Edward G. Robinson) tells Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, is simply “more”. De Tocqueville had already, in the 1830s, commented on the great “restlessness” of the American people; and more than a century later, the British journalist Alistair Cooke remarked that what were regarded as luxuries throughout most of the world, were regarded as necessities in the United States. If Americans never had much of an interest in socialism, they probably had even less interest in buddhism, the occasional Zen center notwithstanding. It was not for nothing that the historian William Leach entitled his study of late-nineteenth-century American expansionism, Land of Desire.
4. Finally, we have a national character based on extreme individualism–Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” As the historian Joyce Appleby describes it, this originated in the shift in the definition of the word “virtue” that took place in the Colonies in the 1790s. Previous to that time, the word had a European (or even classical) definition, namely “the capacity of some men to rise above private interests and devote themselves to the public good.” By 1800, the definition had undergone a complete inversion: “virtue” now meant the capacity to look out for oneself in an opportunistic environment. Whereas the former definition was adhered to by the Federalists, the Jeffersonian Republicans actively promoted the latter definition, as part of the new nation’s break with England and all things European. Life was not to be about service to the community, but rather about competition and acquisition of goods. This is summarized in the popular American expression, “There is no free lunch.” The “self-made man” is expected to make it on his own.
There have been very few dissenters to this fourth ism; in many ways, American history can be seen as the story of a nation consistently choosing individual solutions over collective ones. One American who did dissent, however, was Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions he wrote: “The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin.”
And “ruin” is the operative word here. While there is certainly an upside to these four isms–the sunny side of technological innovation and the Yankee “can-do” mentality, for example–in the long run these unconscious mythologies, in dialectical fashion, began to turn against those caught up in their magic spell. It surely cannot be an accident that 25% of all the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in American jails (1% of the entire US adult population); that two-thirds of the world’s consumption of antidepressants occurs in the United States; that 24% of the American population say that it’s OK to use violence in the pursuit of one’s goals, 44% support the torture of alleged or suspected terrorists, and 39% want Muslims in the US to be required to carry a religious ID on them at all times (why not just make it a yellow star, and be done with it?); that the country has the greatest percentage of single-person dwellings in the world, the highest homicide rate, the largest military budget (by several orders of magnitude), and the greatest number of square feet of shopping malls on the surface of the planet. The data on ignorance, which I have documented elsewhere, are breathtaking, and Robert Putnam’s description (in Bowling Alone) of the collapse of community, trust, and friendship is one of the saddest things I have ever read. Dialectically, and ironically, American “success” became American ruin; the crash of October 2008 was merely the tip of the iceberg.
The power of isms, certainly in the American case, derives from the fact that they are unconscious, embedded deep in the psyche. They constitute Conspiracies in that those who hold them are like marionettes on strings, screaming “Obama!” (for example) without realizing that the new president can no more buck the elites running the country than he can dismantle the mythologies that drive its citizens–himself included. As for the individual, so for the nation: the only hope is to see ourselves as we are seen, from the outside, as it were. And therein lies the paradox. For the four Conspiracies close in on themselves, forming a kind of mirror-lined glass sphere that does not permit any dissonant information to enter. Sandel, Mills, Rothkopf, Bellah, Mead, Leach, Appleby, Putnam–America’s finest, really–will never become household words, and if they did, it would probably be as objects of contempt. For this is finally the most terrifying thing about isms or Conspiracies: we do not choose them; rather, it is they that choose us.
©Morris Berman, 2008
Elite theory, then, holds that the people (or masses) are under the illusion that through their vote they control the direction of the ship of state, whereas the real captains of the ship–the captains of industry, the eminences grises–are not themselves on the ballot. The public does not get to vote for them, but rather for their paid representatives. Thus the post-election euphoria in the United States over Barack Obama is nothing more than a bubble, an illusion, because the lion’s share of the $750 million he collected in campaign contributions (according to the Australian journalist John Pilger) came from Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. These corporations, it hardly need be said, do not have the welfare of the American people as their top priority; and it is also the case that having invested in a president, they expect a return on their investment once he takes office. And if history is any guide here, they are going to get it. It is for this reason that what we have in the United States, according to Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel, is a “procedural democracy”: the form, the appearance, is democratic, but the actual content, the result, is not. As the eminent sociologist C. Wright Mills put it in 1956,
“In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the
political order, that clue is the decline of politics as genuine and
public debate of alternative decisions....America is now in considerable
part more a formal political democracy than a democratic social
structure, and even the formal political mechanics are weak.”
While it is undoubtedly true that elites occasionally act in a deliberate and concerted way, it was Mills in particular who pointed out that the reality was significantly more nuanced than this. For the most part, it is not that the rich or super-rich get together in some corporate boardroom and ask themselves, “Now how can we best screw the workers and the middle class?” No, said Mills, what in fact happens is that they socialize together, in an informal sort of way, and recognize their class affiliations:
“Members of the several higher circles know one another as personal
friends and even as neighbors; they mingle with one another on the
golf course, in the gentlemen’s clubs, at resorts, on transcontinental
airplanes, and on ocean liners. They meet at the estates of mutual
friends, face each other in front of the TV camera, or serve on the same
philanthropic committee; and many are sure to cross one another’s path
in the columns of newspapers, if not in the exact cafés from which many
of these columns originate....The conception of the power elite,
accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history
since the origins of World War II must be understood as a secret plot,
or as a great and co-ordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite.
The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds.”
We are not, in short, talking about some sort of organized brotherhood, some quasi-Masonic financial clique, as it were. However–and this is the crucial point–in terms of concrete outcome, we might as well be. Mills goes on:
“But, once the conjunction of structural trends and of the personal will
to utilize it gave rise to the power elite, then plans and programs did
occur to its members and indeed it is not possible to interpret many
events and official policies...without reference to the power elite.”
Mills’ work falls more into the category of social criticism than of social science per se; he was not big on facts and figures. But in the fifty-plus years since he wrote the above words, his profile of American democracy as illusory has been fleshed out by numerous sociologists and political scientists armed with reams of data. The most recent work in this genre, Superclass, by David Rothkopf, identifies a global elite of roughly 6,000 individuals who are running the show, worldwide, and the top fifty financial institutions that control nearly $50 trillion in assets. Plot or no plot, the results are the same.
This, then, is elite theory, or what I call conspiracy with a small “c”. And it is a real fact of political life, no question about it. But what may be even more significant than this are what I call Conspiracies with a capital “C”, by which I mean the unconscious mythologies, or isms, that govern American life. This was the thing that Marx, and Mills, both missed (though the Italian sociologist Antonio Gramsci did come close to it with his notion of “hegemony,” or the symbolic control of society): the elites aren’t doing anything that the masses don’t already agree with; which is why, certainly, in the United States, socialism never really had a chance. When Henry Wriston, who was president of the Council on Foreign Relations during 1951-64, wrote that U.S. foreign policy “is the expression of the will of the people,” he knew what he was talking about. As many observers (even American ones) have pointed out, what the American people–less than 5% of the world’s population–want is an indulgent and wasteful lifestyle, in which they consume 25% of the world’s energy. Thus in the presidential debates of October 2008, Barack Obama referred to the 25% figure, and then talked about ways of ensuring that that rate of consumption continue unchecked. He did not, as did Jimmy Carter more than thirty years ago, argue that growth was not necessarily a positive thing, that Americans needed to burn less energy, and that the American military–the guarantor of that profligate lifestyle–had to be scaled down accordingly. Indeed, within two years of taking office, Mr. Carter was popularly regarded as something of a joke, and by 1980 Ronald Reagan, who told the American people they could have it all, was elected by a landslide. (Significantly, the first thing he did upon moving into the White House was to have the solar panels that Mr. Carter had installed on the roof removed.) So while it is true that elites run the show, they nevertheless govern with the (misguided) consent of the people. As the nineteenth-century Sioux holy man, Chief Sitting Bull, was supposed to have said, “possessions are a disease with them.” But his was hardly the majority view–not then, not now.
What, then, are the major Conspiracies, or isms, of American life? I think we can identify four, in particular.
1. The notion of Americans as the “chosen people,” and of the nation as a “city on a hill.” This latter phrase–quoted by both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential campaign–goes back to the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, as he was sailing from England to America on the Arabella in 1630:
“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us....He shall
make us a praise and glory....For we must Consider that we
shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
The idea is that it would be America’s unique mission to bring democracy to all the peoples of the earth, inasmuch as the American way of life was (obviously) the best. (Iraq is merely the latest manifestation of this way of thinking.) In fact, the Puritans took the Jews of the Old Testament as their model, in which the exodus from Egypt, and invasion of Canaan, was regarded as the paradigm for the establishment of the Colonies. Cotton Mather even referred to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “our American Jerusalem.” The notion that the story of the United States is the primary manifestation of God’s will on earth has an enormous hold on the American psyche. “American exceptionalism,” Alexis de Tocqueville called it; it is with us to this day.
2. Along with this we have Ism No. 2: the existence, in the United States, of a “civil religion.” This was first pointed out by the sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967, the fact that despite the presence of Catholicism, Judaism, and numerous Protestant sects in America, the real religion of the American people was America itself. To be an American is regarded (unconsciously, by Americans) as an ideological/religious commitment, not an accident of birth. This is why critics of the US are immediately labeled “un-American,” and are practically regarded as traitors. (Quite ridiculous, when you think about it: can you imagine a Swedish critic of Sweden, for example, being attacked as “un-Swedish”?) The historian Sidney Mead pegged it correctly when he called America “the nation with the soul of a church,” while another historian, Richard Hofstadter, declared that “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.” As Graham Greene portrayed it in The Quiet American, this is not a position that encourages self-reflection.
3. The third unconscious mythology is the one identified by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893: the existence of a supposedly endless frontier, into which the American people would expand geographically. Eventually, it became an economic frontier, and finally an imperial one–Manifest Destiny gone global. This lay at the heart of the Carter-Reagan debate, for the notion of limits to growth is almost a form of heresy in an American context. The American Dream envisions a world without limits, in which the goal, as the gangster (played by Edward G. Robinson) tells Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, is simply “more”. De Tocqueville had already, in the 1830s, commented on the great “restlessness” of the American people; and more than a century later, the British journalist Alistair Cooke remarked that what were regarded as luxuries throughout most of the world, were regarded as necessities in the United States. If Americans never had much of an interest in socialism, they probably had even less interest in buddhism, the occasional Zen center notwithstanding. It was not for nothing that the historian William Leach entitled his study of late-nineteenth-century American expansionism, Land of Desire.
4. Finally, we have a national character based on extreme individualism–Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” As the historian Joyce Appleby describes it, this originated in the shift in the definition of the word “virtue” that took place in the Colonies in the 1790s. Previous to that time, the word had a European (or even classical) definition, namely “the capacity of some men to rise above private interests and devote themselves to the public good.” By 1800, the definition had undergone a complete inversion: “virtue” now meant the capacity to look out for oneself in an opportunistic environment. Whereas the former definition was adhered to by the Federalists, the Jeffersonian Republicans actively promoted the latter definition, as part of the new nation’s break with England and all things European. Life was not to be about service to the community, but rather about competition and acquisition of goods. This is summarized in the popular American expression, “There is no free lunch.” The “self-made man” is expected to make it on his own.
There have been very few dissenters to this fourth ism; in many ways, American history can be seen as the story of a nation consistently choosing individual solutions over collective ones. One American who did dissent, however, was Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions he wrote: “The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin.”
And “ruin” is the operative word here. While there is certainly an upside to these four isms–the sunny side of technological innovation and the Yankee “can-do” mentality, for example–in the long run these unconscious mythologies, in dialectical fashion, began to turn against those caught up in their magic spell. It surely cannot be an accident that 25% of all the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in American jails (1% of the entire US adult population); that two-thirds of the world’s consumption of antidepressants occurs in the United States; that 24% of the American population say that it’s OK to use violence in the pursuit of one’s goals, 44% support the torture of alleged or suspected terrorists, and 39% want Muslims in the US to be required to carry a religious ID on them at all times (why not just make it a yellow star, and be done with it?); that the country has the greatest percentage of single-person dwellings in the world, the highest homicide rate, the largest military budget (by several orders of magnitude), and the greatest number of square feet of shopping malls on the surface of the planet. The data on ignorance, which I have documented elsewhere, are breathtaking, and Robert Putnam’s description (in Bowling Alone) of the collapse of community, trust, and friendship is one of the saddest things I have ever read. Dialectically, and ironically, American “success” became American ruin; the crash of October 2008 was merely the tip of the iceberg.
The power of isms, certainly in the American case, derives from the fact that they are unconscious, embedded deep in the psyche. They constitute Conspiracies in that those who hold them are like marionettes on strings, screaming “Obama!” (for example) without realizing that the new president can no more buck the elites running the country than he can dismantle the mythologies that drive its citizens–himself included. As for the individual, so for the nation: the only hope is to see ourselves as we are seen, from the outside, as it were. And therein lies the paradox. For the four Conspiracies close in on themselves, forming a kind of mirror-lined glass sphere that does not permit any dissonant information to enter. Sandel, Mills, Rothkopf, Bellah, Mead, Leach, Appleby, Putnam–America’s finest, really–will never become household words, and if they did, it would probably be as objects of contempt. For this is finally the most terrifying thing about isms or Conspiracies: we do not choose them; rather, it is they that choose us.
©Morris Berman, 2008
October 26, 2008
September 28, 2008
A Show About Nothing
Dear Friends,
As I mentioned a while back, I'm the "columnista internacional" for a quarterly cultural journal in Mexico. Theme of next issue is humor. Below, my contribution (English version). Enjoy!--mb
One of the most successful sitcoms in the history of American television was the show Seinfeld, which debuted in 1989 and ran continuously through 1998. The principal scriptwriters, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, originally pitched it to NBC as “a show about nothing,” because their idea was that the individual episodes would have no plot and instead focus on the trivia of everyday life. For the most part, they stuck to the plan, and the show proved to be hysterically funny. It was also, I’m proud to say, very much a case of Jewish humor, which some might argue is humor at its best. As Freud pointed out in his famous book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a joke is never just a joke; it masks a subtext, an intention that is typically very different from what is being overtly expressed. And in the case of Jewish humor, that subtext is almost always sad, depressing, or even tragic. The function of the joke is to ease the pain.
My maternal grandfather, who virtually raised me, told lots of jokes of this sort. He even compiled a book of aphorisms, based on the east European oral tradition, ones that had this kind of twist to them. (It was published in Wilno, Poland, in Yiddish in 1930.) One of his favorite jokes–it may have even been a true story, for all I know–was about a man who went to his doctor for his annual checkup. The doctor examined him, took blood, etc., but was unable to collect a urine specimen because the man did not have the urge to go at that particular moment. “Drop it off tomorrow,” the doctor told him. The man went home, got up the next morning, peed in a jar, and then had a bright idea: the family was too poor for everyone to have a medical exam; why not have them all pee in the same jar, so that unbeknownst to the doctor, the entire family could get analyzed at the same time? So the wife and children were added to the mix, and as the man was leaving his house to go to the doctor’s he decided he might as well throw in a sample from the family horse, which was tethered to a tree in the front yard. He then brought the jar to the doctor’s office. “Come back next week,” the doctor said, “and I’ll give you the results.” The man left and returned in seven days. “Everything seems to be fine,” said the doctor; “the only thing I would recommend is that you cut down on your intake of oats.”
Funny, yes? But the humor masks a situation that was daily fare for the Jews of eastern Europe: extreme poverty. In fact, my grandfather told me that at one point the family managed to survive by eating the plaster off the door jambs of the house they were living in. Nothing funny about that.
In the case of the Seinfeld scripts, Jerry provided the upbeat, overt aspect of the show’s humor, while Larry David supplied the subtext. Larry’s vision, especially about America, was quite dark. As a result, there is an undercurrent in the episodes, one which says that the United States is a country in which friendship is pretty much a sham and community nonexistent; a society where nobody gives a damn about anybody else. This is true not only in the way that the four central characters–Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer–relate to those outside their little circle, but also in the way they relate to each other. They often talk simultaneously, “through” each other, as though the other person weren’t even present. All four of them appear to have only one motive: advancement of their own personal and immediate goals. In a word, the show is actually about the callousness, the almost autistic indifference, of daily life in America; and this is revealed in episode after episode. Just off the top of my head, the following vignettes come to mind:
-Elaine and Jerry are sitting in a coffee shop when they are approached by a man who explains that his son is a big fan of Jerry’s, and loves watching him when he appears on TV. It turns out that the boy has some rare immune-deficiency disease that requires him to live in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble. As he talks about his little “bubble boy,” the man begins to weep. Elaine, also crying, reaches for the napkin holder and hands napkins to the man and Jerry. She and the man wipe their eyes; Jerry, who is calmly munching on a sandwich, matter-of-factly wipes his mouth.
-George and his girlfriend Susan drive north from New York City for a holiday weekend at her grandfather’s cabin. George gives Susan money to pay the tolls en route. It turns out that Kramer visited the cabin a bit earlier and accidentally left a lit cigar behind–one that Susan’s father had given to George, who in turn had given to Kramer. By the time George and Susan arrive at the cabin, the place is engulfed in flames. Susan screams, “Oh my God, the cabin ” George turns to her and says, “I just remembered: I don’t think you gave me the change from the money I gave you for the tolls.”
-A scene at a funeral, being held for an acquaintance of Jerry’s and Elaine’s who was killed in an auto accident. They are sitting in church (or synagogue), waiting for the service to begin. In the background, we hear the periodic sobbing of the family members. Elaine turns to Jerry and says, “I really have to get some new clothes. I’m bored with everything I have.” Pause; more sobbing, which is now much louder. “Really,” she continues, “I have absolutely nothing to wear.”
-Another funeral, this time for one of Jerry’s relatives. Elaine is hell-bent on getting the deceased’s rent-controlled apartment. As she moves forward in the receiving line to express her condolences, she finally shakes the hand of an elderly relative of the deceased, who happens to be hard of hearing, and yells in his ear, “So what about the apartment?”
-George is attending the birthday party of his current girlfriend’s little boy. At some point, someone burns a hamburger in the kitchen, and smoke starts pouring out the kitchen door. “Fire ” yells George, “Fire ”, as he makes for the front door of the house, knocking over old women and little children in his path.
-As if to deliberately mock the notion of community (or lack thereof), there is an episode in which Kramer takes photos of everyone in the building and posts them, along with the corresponding name of each person, on the wall of the foyer, just inside the entrance. The idea is that the residents will now be able to greet each other by name. The whole thing is too phony to be believed, especially when the tenants begin kissing one another when they meet–a common practice in Mexico and other countries, but totally inappropriate in the United States. Jerry, who can’t stand the bullshit involved, opts out, refusing to kiss and hug, and thereby becomes the target of much public hostility.
All of this reaches a kind of climax in the very last episode of the show, in which the Larry David and Jerry make their opinion of the nature of American social life quite clear. In this ninety-minute finale, the Fab Four are arrested in Massachusetts for ignoring a (nonexistent, in real life) “Good Samaritan Law,” whereby one is supposedly required to come to the aid of other people in distress. They are put on trial, and practically everyone from the show’s nine years of episodes flies into this small New England town to watch the proceedings or actually take the witness stand and describe to the judge and jury how abusively they had been treated by the gang. It is at this point that the Seinfeld episodes are revealed for what they were: all of these jokes had something very ugly underneath them. Other people were merely pawns in (or obstacles to) Jerry’s, Elaine’s, George’s, or Kramer’s personal agenda. Humor aside, the scriptwriters leave no doubt that their vision of American life is quite bleak. When Jerry phones his lawyer, “Jackie Chiles” (a Johnnie Cochran look-alike), to explain that they were arrested for not coming to someone’s aid, Jackie explodes with indignation: “Why, that’s ridiculous!” he barks. “You don’t have to help anybody. That’s what this country is all about!” As the popular American expression has it, He got that one right.
The trial over, the judge sentences our heroes to a year in jail, commenting that “your callous disregard for other human beings threatens to rock the very foundations of society.” But which society? Larry and Jerry make it quite clear that in their view, callous disregard for other human beings is the foundation of society–American society, that is. And so the subtext finally breaks through in no uncertain terms: Seinfeld was A Show About Something, after all.
As I mentioned a while back, I'm the "columnista internacional" for a quarterly cultural journal in Mexico. Theme of next issue is humor. Below, my contribution (English version). Enjoy!--mb
One of the most successful sitcoms in the history of American television was the show Seinfeld, which debuted in 1989 and ran continuously through 1998. The principal scriptwriters, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, originally pitched it to NBC as “a show about nothing,” because their idea was that the individual episodes would have no plot and instead focus on the trivia of everyday life. For the most part, they stuck to the plan, and the show proved to be hysterically funny. It was also, I’m proud to say, very much a case of Jewish humor, which some might argue is humor at its best. As Freud pointed out in his famous book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a joke is never just a joke; it masks a subtext, an intention that is typically very different from what is being overtly expressed. And in the case of Jewish humor, that subtext is almost always sad, depressing, or even tragic. The function of the joke is to ease the pain.
My maternal grandfather, who virtually raised me, told lots of jokes of this sort. He even compiled a book of aphorisms, based on the east European oral tradition, ones that had this kind of twist to them. (It was published in Wilno, Poland, in Yiddish in 1930.) One of his favorite jokes–it may have even been a true story, for all I know–was about a man who went to his doctor for his annual checkup. The doctor examined him, took blood, etc., but was unable to collect a urine specimen because the man did not have the urge to go at that particular moment. “Drop it off tomorrow,” the doctor told him. The man went home, got up the next morning, peed in a jar, and then had a bright idea: the family was too poor for everyone to have a medical exam; why not have them all pee in the same jar, so that unbeknownst to the doctor, the entire family could get analyzed at the same time? So the wife and children were added to the mix, and as the man was leaving his house to go to the doctor’s he decided he might as well throw in a sample from the family horse, which was tethered to a tree in the front yard. He then brought the jar to the doctor’s office. “Come back next week,” the doctor said, “and I’ll give you the results.” The man left and returned in seven days. “Everything seems to be fine,” said the doctor; “the only thing I would recommend is that you cut down on your intake of oats.”
Funny, yes? But the humor masks a situation that was daily fare for the Jews of eastern Europe: extreme poverty. In fact, my grandfather told me that at one point the family managed to survive by eating the plaster off the door jambs of the house they were living in. Nothing funny about that.
In the case of the Seinfeld scripts, Jerry provided the upbeat, overt aspect of the show’s humor, while Larry David supplied the subtext. Larry’s vision, especially about America, was quite dark. As a result, there is an undercurrent in the episodes, one which says that the United States is a country in which friendship is pretty much a sham and community nonexistent; a society where nobody gives a damn about anybody else. This is true not only in the way that the four central characters–Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer–relate to those outside their little circle, but also in the way they relate to each other. They often talk simultaneously, “through” each other, as though the other person weren’t even present. All four of them appear to have only one motive: advancement of their own personal and immediate goals. In a word, the show is actually about the callousness, the almost autistic indifference, of daily life in America; and this is revealed in episode after episode. Just off the top of my head, the following vignettes come to mind:
-Elaine and Jerry are sitting in a coffee shop when they are approached by a man who explains that his son is a big fan of Jerry’s, and loves watching him when he appears on TV. It turns out that the boy has some rare immune-deficiency disease that requires him to live in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble. As he talks about his little “bubble boy,” the man begins to weep. Elaine, also crying, reaches for the napkin holder and hands napkins to the man and Jerry. She and the man wipe their eyes; Jerry, who is calmly munching on a sandwich, matter-of-factly wipes his mouth.
-George and his girlfriend Susan drive north from New York City for a holiday weekend at her grandfather’s cabin. George gives Susan money to pay the tolls en route. It turns out that Kramer visited the cabin a bit earlier and accidentally left a lit cigar behind–one that Susan’s father had given to George, who in turn had given to Kramer. By the time George and Susan arrive at the cabin, the place is engulfed in flames. Susan screams, “Oh my God, the cabin ” George turns to her and says, “I just remembered: I don’t think you gave me the change from the money I gave you for the tolls.”
-A scene at a funeral, being held for an acquaintance of Jerry’s and Elaine’s who was killed in an auto accident. They are sitting in church (or synagogue), waiting for the service to begin. In the background, we hear the periodic sobbing of the family members. Elaine turns to Jerry and says, “I really have to get some new clothes. I’m bored with everything I have.” Pause; more sobbing, which is now much louder. “Really,” she continues, “I have absolutely nothing to wear.”
-Another funeral, this time for one of Jerry’s relatives. Elaine is hell-bent on getting the deceased’s rent-controlled apartment. As she moves forward in the receiving line to express her condolences, she finally shakes the hand of an elderly relative of the deceased, who happens to be hard of hearing, and yells in his ear, “So what about the apartment?”
-George is attending the birthday party of his current girlfriend’s little boy. At some point, someone burns a hamburger in the kitchen, and smoke starts pouring out the kitchen door. “Fire ” yells George, “Fire ”, as he makes for the front door of the house, knocking over old women and little children in his path.
-As if to deliberately mock the notion of community (or lack thereof), there is an episode in which Kramer takes photos of everyone in the building and posts them, along with the corresponding name of each person, on the wall of the foyer, just inside the entrance. The idea is that the residents will now be able to greet each other by name. The whole thing is too phony to be believed, especially when the tenants begin kissing one another when they meet–a common practice in Mexico and other countries, but totally inappropriate in the United States. Jerry, who can’t stand the bullshit involved, opts out, refusing to kiss and hug, and thereby becomes the target of much public hostility.
All of this reaches a kind of climax in the very last episode of the show, in which the Larry David and Jerry make their opinion of the nature of American social life quite clear. In this ninety-minute finale, the Fab Four are arrested in Massachusetts for ignoring a (nonexistent, in real life) “Good Samaritan Law,” whereby one is supposedly required to come to the aid of other people in distress. They are put on trial, and practically everyone from the show’s nine years of episodes flies into this small New England town to watch the proceedings or actually take the witness stand and describe to the judge and jury how abusively they had been treated by the gang. It is at this point that the Seinfeld episodes are revealed for what they were: all of these jokes had something very ugly underneath them. Other people were merely pawns in (or obstacles to) Jerry’s, Elaine’s, George’s, or Kramer’s personal agenda. Humor aside, the scriptwriters leave no doubt that their vision of American life is quite bleak. When Jerry phones his lawyer, “Jackie Chiles” (a Johnnie Cochran look-alike), to explain that they were arrested for not coming to someone’s aid, Jackie explodes with indignation: “Why, that’s ridiculous!” he barks. “You don’t have to help anybody. That’s what this country is all about!” As the popular American expression has it, He got that one right.
The trial over, the judge sentences our heroes to a year in jail, commenting that “your callous disregard for other human beings threatens to rock the very foundations of society.” But which society? Larry and Jerry make it quite clear that in their view, callous disregard for other human beings is the foundation of society–American society, that is. And so the subtext finally breaks through in no uncertain terms: Seinfeld was A Show About Something, after all.
September 02, 2008
No Time to Think
Dear Friends:
"No Time to Think" is the title of a lecture given a few months ago by David Levy of the University of Washington at the Google Corporation. I found it very thought provoking, and wrote Prof. Levy a response. Thought you all might be interested in this. First, here's the link to the lecture:
http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=KHGcvj3JiGA
And here's my response:
Dear Prof. Levy:
Someone recently sent me the video of your March lecture on the matter of information overload. I thought the history of the problem, as you presented it, was terrific. (I cover some of this, BTW--esp. the control revolution, rise of the corporation, and rise of advertising--in my book "The Twilight of American Culture".) The case you make for the need for quiet space, related to creativity, is obviously an important one.
I also enjoyed the photo you reproduced of the billboard in Northern California, telling us to "fill your head." I teach at a university in Mexico City, and 2 weeks ago was driving through town with my dean (dept. of humanities), when we passed a billboard ad for cell phones, which had the caption--in English, for some reason--"KILL SILENCE". Says it all, I thought. My dean suggested that I was "fixated" on the matter of cell phones pervading our culture. Later, I realized that this was to frame the topic upside down: it's the *culture* that's fixated--on cell phones and related toys; I'm just pointing out the fixation. But from the world view of a fixated culture, of course, I'm the one who is going to appear "fixated". (Depends on where you are standing, I guess, as Archimedes showed us long ago; Tom Stoppard, more recently.)
I've slowly been working on a book over the past couple of years tentatively titled "Progress and Its Shadow." Meanwhile, I discovered that someone named Eric Cohen beat me to it (sort of--although I have yet to read the book) with his own title, "In the Shadow of Progress." In addition, the last couple of years have witnessed a fleet of articles on the subject of backlash--that multitasking and all of these toys actually *decrease* productivity (to the tune of a lost $650 billion to US industry in 2007). Thus there was a recent article in The Atlantic on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", and a number of essays on the detrimental effects of multitasking.
The real problem I see in dealing with the shadow is, I have to say, something I feel you missed in your presentation, namely, that technology is not neutral. We commonly believe that it is merely a tool, like a razor blade: you can slice salami, or your wrists; it's a matter of choice. But as writers from Herbert Marcuse to Marshall McLuhan have shown, tech is very far from neutral; it changes the environment in which we operate, until the medium becomes the message. (In Marcuse's language, modern tech is "purposive-rational"; it shatters the context.) Hence, when you talk about creating "contemplative space" within a virtual setting, or of having people bring their laptops into quiet areas of a library (and how is it, that libraries now have to have "quiet areas"? I thought the idea of the library was that it be *entirely* quiet)--well, these are really just technological fixes, it seems to me. And they won't work: you bring a laptop into a library, and ultimately it becomes a different sort of place. The problem with the yogic response, of being a "lotus in a cesspool," so to speak, is that eventually what you get is not a transformed cesspool, but rather a dirty lotus. Or to put it another way: sure, you can read the work of Lao-Tzu online, but this is not what a virtual environment is designed to do. People don't lose weight from diet cheesecake, and the physical environment is not going to be saved by hybrid cars. Your solutions, noble though they are, will eventually be overwhelmed by the context, by the nature of the technology and the momentum of a culture based on expansion and innovation.
By way of comparison, consider the history of our solutions to previous overload situations, such as the control revolution, or the rise of advertising: the remedies were worse than the disease, don't you think? Corporations are now destroying the planet, the worker, or the possibility for a healthy way of life; advertising is--well, no need for me to elaborate on the manufacture of false needs, I'm guessing. We now have three choices regarding the information overload problem, inasmuch as these intermediate possibilities you are suggesting--halfway houses, really--finally won't (imo) change the larger picture.
The first would be legislation regarding the use of technology in public. For example, there are 5 contemplative areas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY--or used to be, anyway. Now, people sit in those spaces and talk on their cell phones, destroying the ambience for which the spaces were originally designed. The problem with legislation is that no one is willing to enforce it. The guards certainly don't care; and the Met can't afford to lose "customers". Legislation regarding the use of cell phones in cars (the source of a huge number of auto accidents every year) has been notoriously ineffective. Nor will it stop the multitasking that goes on at work, quite obviously--employers think it's groovy, even though it's actually costing them millions or billions of dollars every year. I think it's a good bet that the world described by one of the authors you cite, Thomas Hyland Eriksen ("Tyranny of the Moment") will continue unabated, at least for the next few decades.
The second is to physically alter the brain so as to adapt it to hyper-busyness, multitasking, and the new technologies. Francis Fukuyama discusses this a bit in "Our Posthuman Future," and other scholars, such as Maryanne Wolf at Tufts, has written about how digital technology is actually rewiring the brain. Human identity, after all, has not changed in the last 100,000 years (when Homo sapiens sapiens 1st appeared), since the physical brain has not changed in that time period (this being a time span too short for biological evolution). So the "answer," much like the rise of the corporation or advertising, is to force the human being to be like the technology. Prozac, in effect, has already been doing something of this sort, and it should come as no surprise that 2/3 of the anti-depressant drugs consumed in the world are consumed by Americans. This is the Brave New World "solution"; sad to say, I think it is likely.
But it doesn't preclude the 3rd solution, namely, that the whole system, the arc of capitalism itself, from the Commercial Revolution of the 16th century to the Tech-Communications Revolution of the 21st, will finally break down. This strikes me as being *very* likely, and the whole literature of World Systems Analysis (Wallerstein, Chase-Dunn, et al.) supports this view. After all, we didn't leave the Middle Ages voluntarily; it was no easy passage--in fact, the Plague was probably the least difficult part of it(!). This too has been heavily documented by hundreds of historians, and if these sorts of major transitions are any guide, what we shall eventually go through will be nothing short of catastrophic. And I suspect that solution #2, physically altering the brain, will be part of this process. A recent review of one of my books, "Dark Ages America," states that the core of the book is the argument that "the empire we so greatly desire is the destruction we ultimately obtain." That summary seems relevant to the matter of solution #3.
Thank you, in any case, for a stimulating lecture, and for allowing me to bend your ear (eye?) in response.
With kind regards,
Morris Berman
"No Time to Think" is the title of a lecture given a few months ago by David Levy of the University of Washington at the Google Corporation. I found it very thought provoking, and wrote Prof. Levy a response. Thought you all might be interested in this. First, here's the link to the lecture:
http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=KHGcvj3JiGA
And here's my response:
Dear Prof. Levy:
Someone recently sent me the video of your March lecture on the matter of information overload. I thought the history of the problem, as you presented it, was terrific. (I cover some of this, BTW--esp. the control revolution, rise of the corporation, and rise of advertising--in my book "The Twilight of American Culture".) The case you make for the need for quiet space, related to creativity, is obviously an important one.
I also enjoyed the photo you reproduced of the billboard in Northern California, telling us to "fill your head." I teach at a university in Mexico City, and 2 weeks ago was driving through town with my dean (dept. of humanities), when we passed a billboard ad for cell phones, which had the caption--in English, for some reason--"KILL SILENCE". Says it all, I thought. My dean suggested that I was "fixated" on the matter of cell phones pervading our culture. Later, I realized that this was to frame the topic upside down: it's the *culture* that's fixated--on cell phones and related toys; I'm just pointing out the fixation. But from the world view of a fixated culture, of course, I'm the one who is going to appear "fixated". (Depends on where you are standing, I guess, as Archimedes showed us long ago; Tom Stoppard, more recently.)
I've slowly been working on a book over the past couple of years tentatively titled "Progress and Its Shadow." Meanwhile, I discovered that someone named Eric Cohen beat me to it (sort of--although I have yet to read the book) with his own title, "In the Shadow of Progress." In addition, the last couple of years have witnessed a fleet of articles on the subject of backlash--that multitasking and all of these toys actually *decrease* productivity (to the tune of a lost $650 billion to US industry in 2007). Thus there was a recent article in The Atlantic on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", and a number of essays on the detrimental effects of multitasking.
The real problem I see in dealing with the shadow is, I have to say, something I feel you missed in your presentation, namely, that technology is not neutral. We commonly believe that it is merely a tool, like a razor blade: you can slice salami, or your wrists; it's a matter of choice. But as writers from Herbert Marcuse to Marshall McLuhan have shown, tech is very far from neutral; it changes the environment in which we operate, until the medium becomes the message. (In Marcuse's language, modern tech is "purposive-rational"; it shatters the context.) Hence, when you talk about creating "contemplative space" within a virtual setting, or of having people bring their laptops into quiet areas of a library (and how is it, that libraries now have to have "quiet areas"? I thought the idea of the library was that it be *entirely* quiet)--well, these are really just technological fixes, it seems to me. And they won't work: you bring a laptop into a library, and ultimately it becomes a different sort of place. The problem with the yogic response, of being a "lotus in a cesspool," so to speak, is that eventually what you get is not a transformed cesspool, but rather a dirty lotus. Or to put it another way: sure, you can read the work of Lao-Tzu online, but this is not what a virtual environment is designed to do. People don't lose weight from diet cheesecake, and the physical environment is not going to be saved by hybrid cars. Your solutions, noble though they are, will eventually be overwhelmed by the context, by the nature of the technology and the momentum of a culture based on expansion and innovation.
By way of comparison, consider the history of our solutions to previous overload situations, such as the control revolution, or the rise of advertising: the remedies were worse than the disease, don't you think? Corporations are now destroying the planet, the worker, or the possibility for a healthy way of life; advertising is--well, no need for me to elaborate on the manufacture of false needs, I'm guessing. We now have three choices regarding the information overload problem, inasmuch as these intermediate possibilities you are suggesting--halfway houses, really--finally won't (imo) change the larger picture.
The first would be legislation regarding the use of technology in public. For example, there are 5 contemplative areas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY--or used to be, anyway. Now, people sit in those spaces and talk on their cell phones, destroying the ambience for which the spaces were originally designed. The problem with legislation is that no one is willing to enforce it. The guards certainly don't care; and the Met can't afford to lose "customers". Legislation regarding the use of cell phones in cars (the source of a huge number of auto accidents every year) has been notoriously ineffective. Nor will it stop the multitasking that goes on at work, quite obviously--employers think it's groovy, even though it's actually costing them millions or billions of dollars every year. I think it's a good bet that the world described by one of the authors you cite, Thomas Hyland Eriksen ("Tyranny of the Moment") will continue unabated, at least for the next few decades.
The second is to physically alter the brain so as to adapt it to hyper-busyness, multitasking, and the new technologies. Francis Fukuyama discusses this a bit in "Our Posthuman Future," and other scholars, such as Maryanne Wolf at Tufts, has written about how digital technology is actually rewiring the brain. Human identity, after all, has not changed in the last 100,000 years (when Homo sapiens sapiens 1st appeared), since the physical brain has not changed in that time period (this being a time span too short for biological evolution). So the "answer," much like the rise of the corporation or advertising, is to force the human being to be like the technology. Prozac, in effect, has already been doing something of this sort, and it should come as no surprise that 2/3 of the anti-depressant drugs consumed in the world are consumed by Americans. This is the Brave New World "solution"; sad to say, I think it is likely.
But it doesn't preclude the 3rd solution, namely, that the whole system, the arc of capitalism itself, from the Commercial Revolution of the 16th century to the Tech-Communications Revolution of the 21st, will finally break down. This strikes me as being *very* likely, and the whole literature of World Systems Analysis (Wallerstein, Chase-Dunn, et al.) supports this view. After all, we didn't leave the Middle Ages voluntarily; it was no easy passage--in fact, the Plague was probably the least difficult part of it(!). This too has been heavily documented by hundreds of historians, and if these sorts of major transitions are any guide, what we shall eventually go through will be nothing short of catastrophic. And I suspect that solution #2, physically altering the brain, will be part of this process. A recent review of one of my books, "Dark Ages America," states that the core of the book is the argument that "the empire we so greatly desire is the destruction we ultimately obtain." That summary seems relevant to the matter of solution #3.
Thank you, in any case, for a stimulating lecture, and for allowing me to bend your ear (eye?) in response.
With kind regards,
Morris Berman
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