Dear Friends:
For those of you who have suffered thru my various postings for 4.5 years, you now have an opportunity to relive your suffering in paperback form. Yes, it's finally available on Amazon, the collection of essays known as A Question of Values. As Amazon hasn't posted the description of the book just yet, let me do that now:
"A Question of Values is Morris Berman's seventh book of cultural history and social criticism, and his first book of essays, which were written during
2007-10. Timely and uncompromising, they range across four principal topics: American culture and politics; the human existential condition; a close look at the nature of "progress"; and some thoughts on where Western civilization, in general, is headed. These articles pull no punches regarding our current situation, and represent some of Berman's finest writing to date. He challenges his readers to rethink the accepted mainstream system of values, and argues that in the end, our problems are as ethical in nature as they are political. In the context of a value system that is rapidly turning against us, Berman's message is simple: change or die."
Christmas is almost upon us, so this would make an excellent stocking-stuffer; and if you send it to your mainstream, centrist friends, an excellent garbage can stuffer as well! (These folks need to be harassed, as I'm sure most of you will agree. Watch them read the book and chew on rugs, or beat their heads vigorously against the wall, just to relieve the ensuing tension.)
As some of you know, no publisher wanted to touch the book (this more for commercial than ideological reasons, although in the US the two tend to run together), so I am grateful to Amazon and their CreateSpace department for making self-publishing a possibility. They did a beautiful job with this, imo.
BTW, for you hispanohablantes out there, the Spanish translation of the book is being published in Mexico City by Sexto Piso, and should be out in February or March at the lastest: Cuestion de valores. Disfrutanlo!
In other news: my volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, is in the page proof stage and should be available (I'm hoping) sometime next month; the publisher is Cervena Barva Press. And, mirabile dictu, I'm in the process of signing a contract for the third volume of my American Empire series, entitled Capitalism and Its Discontents. (Some publishers do have cojones, I'm happy to report.) This should hit the bookstores by summer of 2011, if all goes well. I'm still struggling to get my novel, Destiny, published; I'll keep you posted on that one.
Thank you all for your support; it's been quite a ride, and I'm grateful to all of you for joining me.
-mb
October 28, 2010
October 25, 2010
Super Sad Love Story
Maybe there really is a zeitgeist floating around. Some time ago, I posted an article on this website entitled “How Chic Was My Progress,” depicting an end-of-empire scenario in which everything was going to hell in a basket, but nobody was that concerned because they had some state-of-the-art laptop or cellphone into which they could stare or talk, thereby feeling that all was right with the world. At the same time that I was writing this, give or take, the Russian-American author Gary Shteyngart was putting the finishing touches on his spectacular novel, Super Sad True Love Story, in which precisely that scenario plays out in the United States. In his version, Americans are on their digital screen device—“apparat” (umlauts over the a’s)—24/7, except when they are sleeping. Relationships of any kind, whether with a book or another human being, are pretty much passé; the screen, along with mass consumerism, has become a total world. In many ways, SSTLS reads like the fictionalized version of my last two books, The Twilight of American Culture and Dark Ages America. I knocked it off in two days, but it was an eerie read.
My own vision of the collapse of America is based on the Roman Empire model, which is one of slow disintegration. Sure, there are “nodes” that punctuate the process, such as 9/11 or the crash of 2008, but all in all one day is pretty much like the next, another step on a downhill slide. Not so for Shteyngart. Given his Russian background, he sees the U.S. following the Soviet pattern, in which a long period of decay issues out into a period of outright collapse, with the economy/society/culture imploding almost overnight. In SSTLS, the dollar is basically worthless, with the Chinese yuan becoming the de facto currency of the country. China effectively owns the United States, in this scenario, as Americans scramble just to survive (cafés have names like “Povertea,” and grocery stores sport signs saying “We accept only yuan sorry”). The government has tried everything—“privatization, deprivatization, savings stimulus, spending stimulus, regulation, deregulation, pegged currency, floating currency, controlled currency, uncontrolled currency, more tariffs, less tariffs”—and the net result is zero. The nation “is no longer critically relevant to the world economy. The rest of the globe is strong enough to decouple from us. We, our country, our city, our infrastructure, are in a state of freefall.” Meanwhile the U.S. is, of course, engaged in another phony war, this time with Venezuela; except that in this case, it is clearly losing, as Venezuelan warships make their way up the Potomac. Human relationships are completely commercial, with Americans constantly using their apparati to calculate the “fuckability” of potential partners. If the novel is an absorbing read, it is also a bleak one, as the citizenry finally tries to escape to Canada or return to the land from which they originally emigrated. The most depressing aspect of the book is that much of what the author describes is already with us; the endgame feels like it’s only fifteen to twenty years away.
A few additional quotes might provide a more vivid portrait. The central character, Lenny Abramov (Shteyngart’s obvious alter ego), is returning to New York from Rome, where he spent a year escaping the United States. He is doing something unusual for an American: reading a book (Chekhov, appropriately enough). People on the plane are staring at him; the young man next to him says, “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks.” Abramov records in his diary: “As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my apparat and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives.” Lenny reflects on the life of one of his friends, Noah, now a trendy broadcaster of meaningless information, but prior to that someone who actually thought about things. “His personal decline,” Lenny writes in his diary, “paralleled that of our culture and state. Before the publishing industry folded, he had published a novel, one of the last that you could actually go out and buy in a Media store.” (Books are now popularly referred to as “doorstops,” inasmuch as that is seen as the only thing they are good for.) Sitting with Noah and a few other “Media” friends in a bar, Lenny and his mates talk about the latest disaster in the Venezuelan war (being managed by a Cheney-like character named Rubenstein, the Secretary of State); the near-collapse of a major credit bank (subsequently bailed out by the Fed); their shrinking stock portfolios; and “the fact that, like most Americans, we would probably lose our jobs soon and be thrown out onto the streets to die.”
A bit later, Noah has Lenny on his TV program, trying to get him to say whether he is sleeping with Eunice, the Korean-American girl he’s been dating. “I know we’re living in Rubenstein’s America,” says Lenny. “But doesn’t that just make us even more responsible for each other’s fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said ‘no’ to all this…What if we just went home and read books to each other?” Noah responds:
“Oh God…You just halved my viewer load. You’re killing me here, Abramov…Okay, folks we’re streaming live here in Rubenstein’s America, zero hour for our economy, zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves, and Lenny Abramov won’t tell us if he fucked this tiny Asian chick.” As it turns out, the American infrastructure is heading toward zero hour as well. Part of the Williamsburg Bridge collapses, and the government’s response is to put up a sign that says “Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge”.
Looking around the streets of New York, Lenny’s impression is similar to my own, when I last visited the city in May 2010 (see “An American Diary”):
“And the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.” As one of Eunice’s Korean friends writes her in a text message, “This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad.” After things collapse in earnest—officially labeled The Rupture—a taxi driver says to Lenny, “now I see what our government is. Nothing inside! Like wood. You break it open, nothing.” (This parallels my experience of being in Berlin during the time that the Wall came down, and seeing tables set up near the Brandenburg Gate, where small-time entrepreneurs were selling Soviet artefacts, such as commissars' hats and hammer-and-sickle pins, now devoid of any real energy. One can easily imagine such a scenario for American flag pins and iPads.)
Finally, the ether grid breaks down, and the electronic devices to which Americans are enslaved fail to work. This leads to suicides, with people writing departing notes “about how they couldn’t see a future without their apparati.” For one thing, it becomes impossible to buy anything. But the corporations are ready, as always, to capitalize on whatever is going on, The Rupture included. Signs go up in New York with messages such as “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay Edge: Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?” Chic to the end; what can one say? Lenny does, however, manage to escape some of this cultural holocaust, spending time reading—from books—to his girlfriend. “Because we can’t connect to our apparati,” he writes in his diary, “we’re learning to turn to each other.” Lying with her in bed, he thinks, “I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn’t that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?” (He’s not exactly representative of the rest of the country, needless to say.) Eunice, who is fifteen years younger than Lenny, tells him: “I never really learned how to read texts. Just to scan them for info.” He replies: “People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age…How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear?” Eunice eventually gets a job selling wristbands featuring “avant-garde representations of decapitated Buddhas and the words RUPTURE NYC” for two thousand yuan a pop.
Meanwhile, the government-corporate plan is to rebuild New York as a kind of “Lifestyle Hub” for the elite, the very wealthy, while the rest of the nation will be carved up by a group of foreign sovereign wealth funds. China may “get” New Jersey, for example, but apparently Norway and Saudi Arabia are interested as well. Order will be maintained by a private security company, playing the role of the former National Guard. And with this, the curtain falls.
Ezra Pound once remarked that artists were the “antennae” of the human race, but that the “bullet-headed majority” would never learn to trust them. We shall, of course, ignore Gary Shteyngart; that goes without saying. Which is a great pity: I have yet to find a more canny, intuitive, and yet, oddly enough, entertaining, description of America’s final days.
(c) Morris Berman, 2010
My own vision of the collapse of America is based on the Roman Empire model, which is one of slow disintegration. Sure, there are “nodes” that punctuate the process, such as 9/11 or the crash of 2008, but all in all one day is pretty much like the next, another step on a downhill slide. Not so for Shteyngart. Given his Russian background, he sees the U.S. following the Soviet pattern, in which a long period of decay issues out into a period of outright collapse, with the economy/society/culture imploding almost overnight. In SSTLS, the dollar is basically worthless, with the Chinese yuan becoming the de facto currency of the country. China effectively owns the United States, in this scenario, as Americans scramble just to survive (cafés have names like “Povertea,” and grocery stores sport signs saying “We accept only yuan sorry”). The government has tried everything—“privatization, deprivatization, savings stimulus, spending stimulus, regulation, deregulation, pegged currency, floating currency, controlled currency, uncontrolled currency, more tariffs, less tariffs”—and the net result is zero. The nation “is no longer critically relevant to the world economy. The rest of the globe is strong enough to decouple from us. We, our country, our city, our infrastructure, are in a state of freefall.” Meanwhile the U.S. is, of course, engaged in another phony war, this time with Venezuela; except that in this case, it is clearly losing, as Venezuelan warships make their way up the Potomac. Human relationships are completely commercial, with Americans constantly using their apparati to calculate the “fuckability” of potential partners. If the novel is an absorbing read, it is also a bleak one, as the citizenry finally tries to escape to Canada or return to the land from which they originally emigrated. The most depressing aspect of the book is that much of what the author describes is already with us; the endgame feels like it’s only fifteen to twenty years away.
A few additional quotes might provide a more vivid portrait. The central character, Lenny Abramov (Shteyngart’s obvious alter ego), is returning to New York from Rome, where he spent a year escaping the United States. He is doing something unusual for an American: reading a book (Chekhov, appropriately enough). People on the plane are staring at him; the young man next to him says, “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks.” Abramov records in his diary: “As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my apparat and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives.” Lenny reflects on the life of one of his friends, Noah, now a trendy broadcaster of meaningless information, but prior to that someone who actually thought about things. “His personal decline,” Lenny writes in his diary, “paralleled that of our culture and state. Before the publishing industry folded, he had published a novel, one of the last that you could actually go out and buy in a Media store.” (Books are now popularly referred to as “doorstops,” inasmuch as that is seen as the only thing they are good for.) Sitting with Noah and a few other “Media” friends in a bar, Lenny and his mates talk about the latest disaster in the Venezuelan war (being managed by a Cheney-like character named Rubenstein, the Secretary of State); the near-collapse of a major credit bank (subsequently bailed out by the Fed); their shrinking stock portfolios; and “the fact that, like most Americans, we would probably lose our jobs soon and be thrown out onto the streets to die.”
A bit later, Noah has Lenny on his TV program, trying to get him to say whether he is sleeping with Eunice, the Korean-American girl he’s been dating. “I know we’re living in Rubenstein’s America,” says Lenny. “But doesn’t that just make us even more responsible for each other’s fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said ‘no’ to all this…What if we just went home and read books to each other?” Noah responds:
“Oh God…You just halved my viewer load. You’re killing me here, Abramov…Okay, folks we’re streaming live here in Rubenstein’s America, zero hour for our economy, zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves, and Lenny Abramov won’t tell us if he fucked this tiny Asian chick.” As it turns out, the American infrastructure is heading toward zero hour as well. Part of the Williamsburg Bridge collapses, and the government’s response is to put up a sign that says “Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge”.
Looking around the streets of New York, Lenny’s impression is similar to my own, when I last visited the city in May 2010 (see “An American Diary”):
“And the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.” As one of Eunice’s Korean friends writes her in a text message, “This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad.” After things collapse in earnest—officially labeled The Rupture—a taxi driver says to Lenny, “now I see what our government is. Nothing inside! Like wood. You break it open, nothing.” (This parallels my experience of being in Berlin during the time that the Wall came down, and seeing tables set up near the Brandenburg Gate, where small-time entrepreneurs were selling Soviet artefacts, such as commissars' hats and hammer-and-sickle pins, now devoid of any real energy. One can easily imagine such a scenario for American flag pins and iPads.)
Finally, the ether grid breaks down, and the electronic devices to which Americans are enslaved fail to work. This leads to suicides, with people writing departing notes “about how they couldn’t see a future without their apparati.” For one thing, it becomes impossible to buy anything. But the corporations are ready, as always, to capitalize on whatever is going on, The Rupture included. Signs go up in New York with messages such as “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay Edge: Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?” Chic to the end; what can one say? Lenny does, however, manage to escape some of this cultural holocaust, spending time reading—from books—to his girlfriend. “Because we can’t connect to our apparati,” he writes in his diary, “we’re learning to turn to each other.” Lying with her in bed, he thinks, “I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn’t that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?” (He’s not exactly representative of the rest of the country, needless to say.) Eunice, who is fifteen years younger than Lenny, tells him: “I never really learned how to read texts. Just to scan them for info.” He replies: “People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age…How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear?” Eunice eventually gets a job selling wristbands featuring “avant-garde representations of decapitated Buddhas and the words RUPTURE NYC” for two thousand yuan a pop.
Meanwhile, the government-corporate plan is to rebuild New York as a kind of “Lifestyle Hub” for the elite, the very wealthy, while the rest of the nation will be carved up by a group of foreign sovereign wealth funds. China may “get” New Jersey, for example, but apparently Norway and Saudi Arabia are interested as well. Order will be maintained by a private security company, playing the role of the former National Guard. And with this, the curtain falls.
Ezra Pound once remarked that artists were the “antennae” of the human race, but that the “bullet-headed majority” would never learn to trust them. We shall, of course, ignore Gary Shteyngart; that goes without saying. Which is a great pity: I have yet to find a more canny, intuitive, and yet, oddly enough, entertaining, description of America’s final days.
(c) Morris Berman, 2010
September 20, 2010
Tongue in Chic
I’m in with the in crowd
I go where the in crowd goes
I’m in with the in crowd
And I know what the in crowd knows.
–Dobie Gray, “The In Crowd”
For many years now, I have been fascinated by the human desire to be “cool,” to be perceived by others as in the know, “hipper” than all the rest. I recall one fellow-student in my dormitory, during my first year at university, writing an essay on the subject for a class in English or sociology. This was in the early years of the sixties, when the work of Vance Packard (The Status Seekers, The Pyramid Climbers, etc.) was very much in the air. In any case, this student interpreted the actions of everyone on campus–students, staff, faculty, administration–as attempts to demonstrate that one was more sophisticated than everyone else. He wasn’t far off, as it turns out: a student guide to American universities subsequently described the ambience of the place as that of “one-upsmanship.”
I was impressed by the analysis of this student’s essay because it corresponded to my own experience. Thinking back, it seems to me that virtually every conversation I had or witnessed during those years had as its subtext the desire to impress. Not much of a basis for friendship, of course, and it is not surprising that I never returned to the place, never attended a class reunion, and never kept in touch with anyone from that era.
But it would be wrong to assume that university is where all of this begins. The phenomenon of cliques and in-groups dates at least from high school, which sets the template for all our future relationships. I remember one extremely intelligent student, Roger S., deciding to run for class president one year. There was a school assembly at which each of the candidates had five minutes to present their “platform.” After a series of morons in suits talked about how they would institute free coke machines or whatever, Roger got up, dressed in everyday clothing–definitely uncool–and quietly told his audience, “I’m not here to impress you. I don’t intend to dress up for you. I have no free gifts to offer you. I’m just going to give you honest student government and a real opportunity for you to participate in it.” Roger was the epitome of unchic and was consequently slaughtered at the polls, end of story. (Well, not quite: Roger went on to become Chief of Cardiology at one of the largest medical schools in the country. As for the guy giving out free Coca-Cola, he has long since disappeared from the historical record.)
In a sense, we remain in high school all our lives. This is pathetic, but it finally is what politics, and our social lives, are all about. I recall the wife of a famous psychiatrist–a guru, really–telling me that if she had friends over for dinner, the next week all of the women who had been at her house adopted her style of dress and cuisine. If she then changed these, they followed accordingly. It was as though they believed in a contagion theory of chicness: if they copied her, some of the “glow” would rub off on them. Absurd, yes, but this desire for chicness is no small force in human psychology or history. It’s the norm, not the exception.
The truth is that trying to be cool is a behavior that dates from the Paleolithic. When Paleolithic skeletons are dug up from roughly 35,000 years ago, and are found wearing jewelry–beads, pendants, necklaces–what else can this indicate but an attempt to say one is special–in fact, better than others? The same goes for “special” grave sites for the elite. Personal adornment and special graveyards are about status differentiation–Vance Packard in the Stone Age, one might say. All the evidence points to a new type of personality organization around that time, which made possible culture as we know it, and which also included the need to feel superior to others–in particular, wanting to be seen as superior to others. After all, being cool is something that has to be publicly agreed upon; it is essentially other-defined. Which means it is as insubstantial as gossamer; who or what is cool can change in the twinkling of an eye. But human beings pursue it as if their lives depended on it. In fact, very few human beings manage to escape the lure of superiority. When you meet Zen masters who are proud of their humility (an experience I’ve actually had), you know, as André Malraux once observed, that “there really is no such thing as a grown-up person.”
Chasing status may be puerile, said John Adams, but it nevertheless seems to be hard-wired. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1787), he said that history makes it quite clear that man is driven by vanity, by a desire for social distinction. “We may call this desire for distinction childish and silly,” wrote Adams, “but we cannot alter the nature of man.”
As a result, literally anything can be made chic, even garbage. There is a famous scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up in which a band leader goes crazy and smashes his guitar to pieces on the stage. The central character (played by the British actor David Hemmings) leaps onto the stage, seizes the guitar “carcass,” and runs off with it, pursued by the crowd, who is convinced he is in possession of something extremely valuable. He manages to give them the slip, and standing alone in an alley, trying to catch his breath, looks at this broken piece of guitar. What is it? A useless piece of trash, really. He tosses it on the ground and walks away.
Even the anti-chic can be made chic. A Canadian magazine, Adbusters, became somewhat famous for ridiculing the need to be chic. It is now one of the chicest journals around–“underground chic,” as it were. If you are not aware of this publication, you are definitely out of it, and not as good as the people who are aware of it and read it on a regular basis. You are leading a diminished, unchic life.
This brings us to the causes of chic. If it really is as frivolous as it looks, why are we all doing it? Why does all of life finally boil down to high school? Alfred Adler, the psychoanalyst whose major concepts were “superiority complex” and “inferiority complex,” argued that the two were intimately related: the desire to be superior masked a deep sense of inferiority. If I care that much about being chic, it must be because I know, on some level, that I am terribly unchic. And this feeling of being inadequate, which dates from infancy, can finally never be overcome; which means that chicness is infinite: you can never be chic enough. Malraux was right: we never grow up.
Imported into politics, all of this points to the limit of any egalitarian experiment. Status always manages to sneak in through the back door. Somehow, so-called left-wing writers in the United States (Noam Chomsky excepted; he really is the “real thing”), in their arguments for a just society, compete for influence and visibility, for being the important cultural critic. (I know of one case in which a major left-wing guru actually showed up at a lecture hall in a stretch limousine, surrounded by paparazzi.) The apparatchiki of the former Soviet Union all had dachas (villas) near the Black Sea or in the countryside, and got to buy forbidden Western goods at special stores reserved for them alone. In the end, Lao Tzu was right: the only person you want as a leader is the one who is not interested in the job. (Man, that dude was really chic.)
I recall, early on in the Clinton administration, the attempt to institute a program that would have involved holding and loving infants for the first three years of their lives. I don’t think the Clintons were trying to be chic here; I think they were genuinely committed to the fundamental concept of child psychology, that feeling secure and loved as a child means one will be less likely to be aggressive and competitive as an adult. Of course, the whole thing fell out of sight in less than a month, as the news media moved on to the next trendy topic. But it was a utopian project, in any case: if we are going to have to restructure human child-rearing in order to restructure our politics, we are going to be waiting for a very long time. The yogic idea that social transformation is personal transformation multiplied millions of times sounds good in the ashram, but has very little applicability in the outside world.
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “no straight thing was ever made.” On the individual level, the antidote to chic is probably a good sense of humor. I mean, there really is something hilarious about it all, no? But in social or institutional terms, I don’t see that there is very much that can be done. Although lately, I’ve been working on a movie script, in which a large, dark, unchic force comes out of nowhere and sweeps across the planet, de-chic-ing everything in its path. I think of it as a kind of a reverse horror film. So stay tuned to this station; I’ll let you know how it all turns out.
©Morris Berman, 2010
I go where the in crowd goes
I’m in with the in crowd
And I know what the in crowd knows.
–Dobie Gray, “The In Crowd”
For many years now, I have been fascinated by the human desire to be “cool,” to be perceived by others as in the know, “hipper” than all the rest. I recall one fellow-student in my dormitory, during my first year at university, writing an essay on the subject for a class in English or sociology. This was in the early years of the sixties, when the work of Vance Packard (The Status Seekers, The Pyramid Climbers, etc.) was very much in the air. In any case, this student interpreted the actions of everyone on campus–students, staff, faculty, administration–as attempts to demonstrate that one was more sophisticated than everyone else. He wasn’t far off, as it turns out: a student guide to American universities subsequently described the ambience of the place as that of “one-upsmanship.”
I was impressed by the analysis of this student’s essay because it corresponded to my own experience. Thinking back, it seems to me that virtually every conversation I had or witnessed during those years had as its subtext the desire to impress. Not much of a basis for friendship, of course, and it is not surprising that I never returned to the place, never attended a class reunion, and never kept in touch with anyone from that era.
But it would be wrong to assume that university is where all of this begins. The phenomenon of cliques and in-groups dates at least from high school, which sets the template for all our future relationships. I remember one extremely intelligent student, Roger S., deciding to run for class president one year. There was a school assembly at which each of the candidates had five minutes to present their “platform.” After a series of morons in suits talked about how they would institute free coke machines or whatever, Roger got up, dressed in everyday clothing–definitely uncool–and quietly told his audience, “I’m not here to impress you. I don’t intend to dress up for you. I have no free gifts to offer you. I’m just going to give you honest student government and a real opportunity for you to participate in it.” Roger was the epitome of unchic and was consequently slaughtered at the polls, end of story. (Well, not quite: Roger went on to become Chief of Cardiology at one of the largest medical schools in the country. As for the guy giving out free Coca-Cola, he has long since disappeared from the historical record.)
In a sense, we remain in high school all our lives. This is pathetic, but it finally is what politics, and our social lives, are all about. I recall the wife of a famous psychiatrist–a guru, really–telling me that if she had friends over for dinner, the next week all of the women who had been at her house adopted her style of dress and cuisine. If she then changed these, they followed accordingly. It was as though they believed in a contagion theory of chicness: if they copied her, some of the “glow” would rub off on them. Absurd, yes, but this desire for chicness is no small force in human psychology or history. It’s the norm, not the exception.
The truth is that trying to be cool is a behavior that dates from the Paleolithic. When Paleolithic skeletons are dug up from roughly 35,000 years ago, and are found wearing jewelry–beads, pendants, necklaces–what else can this indicate but an attempt to say one is special–in fact, better than others? The same goes for “special” grave sites for the elite. Personal adornment and special graveyards are about status differentiation–Vance Packard in the Stone Age, one might say. All the evidence points to a new type of personality organization around that time, which made possible culture as we know it, and which also included the need to feel superior to others–in particular, wanting to be seen as superior to others. After all, being cool is something that has to be publicly agreed upon; it is essentially other-defined. Which means it is as insubstantial as gossamer; who or what is cool can change in the twinkling of an eye. But human beings pursue it as if their lives depended on it. In fact, very few human beings manage to escape the lure of superiority. When you meet Zen masters who are proud of their humility (an experience I’ve actually had), you know, as André Malraux once observed, that “there really is no such thing as a grown-up person.”
Chasing status may be puerile, said John Adams, but it nevertheless seems to be hard-wired. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1787), he said that history makes it quite clear that man is driven by vanity, by a desire for social distinction. “We may call this desire for distinction childish and silly,” wrote Adams, “but we cannot alter the nature of man.”
As a result, literally anything can be made chic, even garbage. There is a famous scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up in which a band leader goes crazy and smashes his guitar to pieces on the stage. The central character (played by the British actor David Hemmings) leaps onto the stage, seizes the guitar “carcass,” and runs off with it, pursued by the crowd, who is convinced he is in possession of something extremely valuable. He manages to give them the slip, and standing alone in an alley, trying to catch his breath, looks at this broken piece of guitar. What is it? A useless piece of trash, really. He tosses it on the ground and walks away.
Even the anti-chic can be made chic. A Canadian magazine, Adbusters, became somewhat famous for ridiculing the need to be chic. It is now one of the chicest journals around–“underground chic,” as it were. If you are not aware of this publication, you are definitely out of it, and not as good as the people who are aware of it and read it on a regular basis. You are leading a diminished, unchic life.
This brings us to the causes of chic. If it really is as frivolous as it looks, why are we all doing it? Why does all of life finally boil down to high school? Alfred Adler, the psychoanalyst whose major concepts were “superiority complex” and “inferiority complex,” argued that the two were intimately related: the desire to be superior masked a deep sense of inferiority. If I care that much about being chic, it must be because I know, on some level, that I am terribly unchic. And this feeling of being inadequate, which dates from infancy, can finally never be overcome; which means that chicness is infinite: you can never be chic enough. Malraux was right: we never grow up.
Imported into politics, all of this points to the limit of any egalitarian experiment. Status always manages to sneak in through the back door. Somehow, so-called left-wing writers in the United States (Noam Chomsky excepted; he really is the “real thing”), in their arguments for a just society, compete for influence and visibility, for being the important cultural critic. (I know of one case in which a major left-wing guru actually showed up at a lecture hall in a stretch limousine, surrounded by paparazzi.) The apparatchiki of the former Soviet Union all had dachas (villas) near the Black Sea or in the countryside, and got to buy forbidden Western goods at special stores reserved for them alone. In the end, Lao Tzu was right: the only person you want as a leader is the one who is not interested in the job. (Man, that dude was really chic.)
I recall, early on in the Clinton administration, the attempt to institute a program that would have involved holding and loving infants for the first three years of their lives. I don’t think the Clintons were trying to be chic here; I think they were genuinely committed to the fundamental concept of child psychology, that feeling secure and loved as a child means one will be less likely to be aggressive and competitive as an adult. Of course, the whole thing fell out of sight in less than a month, as the news media moved on to the next trendy topic. But it was a utopian project, in any case: if we are going to have to restructure human child-rearing in order to restructure our politics, we are going to be waiting for a very long time. The yogic idea that social transformation is personal transformation multiplied millions of times sounds good in the ashram, but has very little applicability in the outside world.
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “no straight thing was ever made.” On the individual level, the antidote to chic is probably a good sense of humor. I mean, there really is something hilarious about it all, no? But in social or institutional terms, I don’t see that there is very much that can be done. Although lately, I’ve been working on a movie script, in which a large, dark, unchic force comes out of nowhere and sweeps across the planet, de-chic-ing everything in its path. I think of it as a kind of a reverse horror film. So stay tuned to this station; I’ll let you know how it all turns out.
©Morris Berman, 2010
September 03, 2010
A New Meaning for Gettysburg
Dear Friends:
The following essay contains an excerpt from an article that appeared in the the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on August 31, about a casino that is very likely to be built just outside of the Gettysburg battlefield. The essay itself is by Dave Cohen, appearing on the website
peakwatch.typepad.com/decline_of_the_empire on September 1st. You can draw your own conclusions (though I personally think it's hard to argue with Dave's). [My two cents are in brackets, BTW.]
The Meaning Of Gettysburg
Few people outside Pennsylvania know that for a long time now, there have been plans to build a gambling casino 1/2 mile south of the Gettysburg National Military Park.
The Battle of Gettysburg was a turning point in the Civil War, the Union victory in the summer of 1863 that ended General Robert E. Lee's second and most ambitious invasion of the North. Often referred to as the "High Water Mark of the Rebellion", it was the war's bloodiest battle with 51,000 casualties. It also provided President Abraham Lincoln with the setting for his most famous address.
Gettysburg and the surrounding area are as close to Sacred Ground as you can get in America. Yesterday, casino friends and foes testified before the state's Gaming Control Board. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been covering the story.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
By Tom Barnes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
GETTYSBURG -- It's Pro-Casino vs. No-Casino, as advertised.
The state Gaming Control Board is holding an all-day hearing today on whether a $75 million resort hotel casino should be added to the existing Eisenhower hotel and conference center, just south of the southern border of the Gettysburg National Military Park, where thousands of Union and Confederate troops died in early July 1863.
"NO!" shouted Susan Starr Paddock, leader of No Casino Gettysburg, who said a casino so close to "hallowed" Civil War ground would be a national disgrace. She was supported by Nicholas Redding of the Civil War Preservation Trust, who urged the board to "save the hallowed nature of this ground for future citizens and preserve Gettysburg."
"YES!" said David LeVan, owner of a Gettysburg motorcycle dealership and lead developer, along with Penn National Gaming (which would finance and operate the casino), plus several Adams County and Cumberland Township officials (where the casino would be located), who each stand to get $1 million a year from the casinos, to help them add jobs and hold down taxes.
State Rep. Harry Readshaw, D-Carrick, wasn't here today but did have a statement of support that was read. Mr. Readshaw, who has spent the last 13 years restoring the monuments at the Civil War battlefield, said Mr. LeVan "has assisted me in numerous important ways," including an annual fund-raising motorcycle ride from Harrisburg to the Battlefield Harley Davidson dealership in Gettysburg, which Mr. LeVan owns.
The opponents of the casino showed a video in which author David McCullough, filmmaker Ken Burns, actor Sam Waterston, Susan Eisenhower, grandaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower (who lived here after leaving the presidency) and others urged the board to give the second and final resort casino license to one of three other applicants. [Am I reading this correctly? McCullough et al. are not arguing that there should be no casino, but only that the license should be given to someone else??--!] [This is the end of the excerpt from the newspaper.]
It will be impossible to please everybody in this contentious fight—someone must win and someone must lose. I believe there is a novel solution to this dilemma which transcends petty local disputes:
Put this fucking casino right on the battlefield, preferably where the Union men repulsed Pickett's charge, or even better, on the very ground where Lincoln spoke. Whereas in the past Gettysburg has served as a powerful symbol of our desire to be better than we are, of the desire of the United States to rid itself of the moral stain—the evil—of slavery in which one man "owns" another, we now have an opportunity to invest Gettysburg with a new meaning more fitting to the times we live in.
Let this fucking casino be a powerful symbol to future generations of what an open, running, rancid sewer the United States had become by 2010. It is altogether proper that Gettysburg remain an unwavering emblem of who we are, and what we aspire to. Let us resolve today and henceforth to give a New Meaning to Gettysburg.
[Who are we? A sad collection of clowns. What do we aspire to? Money. How much do we care about our heritage? Zip.]
The following essay contains an excerpt from an article that appeared in the the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on August 31, about a casino that is very likely to be built just outside of the Gettysburg battlefield. The essay itself is by Dave Cohen, appearing on the website
peakwatch.typepad.com/decline_of_the_empire on September 1st. You can draw your own conclusions (though I personally think it's hard to argue with Dave's). [My two cents are in brackets, BTW.]
The Meaning Of Gettysburg
Few people outside Pennsylvania know that for a long time now, there have been plans to build a gambling casino 1/2 mile south of the Gettysburg National Military Park.
The Battle of Gettysburg was a turning point in the Civil War, the Union victory in the summer of 1863 that ended General Robert E. Lee's second and most ambitious invasion of the North. Often referred to as the "High Water Mark of the Rebellion", it was the war's bloodiest battle with 51,000 casualties. It also provided President Abraham Lincoln with the setting for his most famous address.
Gettysburg and the surrounding area are as close to Sacred Ground as you can get in America. Yesterday, casino friends and foes testified before the state's Gaming Control Board. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been covering the story.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
By Tom Barnes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
GETTYSBURG -- It's Pro-Casino vs. No-Casino, as advertised.
The state Gaming Control Board is holding an all-day hearing today on whether a $75 million resort hotel casino should be added to the existing Eisenhower hotel and conference center, just south of the southern border of the Gettysburg National Military Park, where thousands of Union and Confederate troops died in early July 1863.
"NO!" shouted Susan Starr Paddock, leader of No Casino Gettysburg, who said a casino so close to "hallowed" Civil War ground would be a national disgrace. She was supported by Nicholas Redding of the Civil War Preservation Trust, who urged the board to "save the hallowed nature of this ground for future citizens and preserve Gettysburg."
"YES!" said David LeVan, owner of a Gettysburg motorcycle dealership and lead developer, along with Penn National Gaming (which would finance and operate the casino), plus several Adams County and Cumberland Township officials (where the casino would be located), who each stand to get $1 million a year from the casinos, to help them add jobs and hold down taxes.
State Rep. Harry Readshaw, D-Carrick, wasn't here today but did have a statement of support that was read. Mr. Readshaw, who has spent the last 13 years restoring the monuments at the Civil War battlefield, said Mr. LeVan "has assisted me in numerous important ways," including an annual fund-raising motorcycle ride from Harrisburg to the Battlefield Harley Davidson dealership in Gettysburg, which Mr. LeVan owns.
The opponents of the casino showed a video in which author David McCullough, filmmaker Ken Burns, actor Sam Waterston, Susan Eisenhower, grandaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower (who lived here after leaving the presidency) and others urged the board to give the second and final resort casino license to one of three other applicants. [Am I reading this correctly? McCullough et al. are not arguing that there should be no casino, but only that the license should be given to someone else??--!] [This is the end of the excerpt from the newspaper.]
It will be impossible to please everybody in this contentious fight—someone must win and someone must lose. I believe there is a novel solution to this dilemma which transcends petty local disputes:
Put this fucking casino right on the battlefield, preferably where the Union men repulsed Pickett's charge, or even better, on the very ground where Lincoln spoke. Whereas in the past Gettysburg has served as a powerful symbol of our desire to be better than we are, of the desire of the United States to rid itself of the moral stain—the evil—of slavery in which one man "owns" another, we now have an opportunity to invest Gettysburg with a new meaning more fitting to the times we live in.
Let this fucking casino be a powerful symbol to future generations of what an open, running, rancid sewer the United States had become by 2010. It is altogether proper that Gettysburg remain an unwavering emblem of who we are, and what we aspire to. Let us resolve today and henceforth to give a New Meaning to Gettysburg.
[Who are we? A sad collection of clowns. What do we aspire to? Money. How much do we care about our heritage? Zip.]
August 25, 2010
August 12, 2010
Spheres of Influence
Some time ago, I had an opportunity to do a silent five-day retreat at a Benedictine monastery. In the past, I had done long meditation retreats of a Buddhist nature, but I had never done anything in a Christian context before, so I decided I should give it a try.
The monastery, which I’ll call Our Lady of Silence, was located in the back woods of Mexico, in the middle of nowhere. The grounds were incredibly beautiful, dotted with agave and cactus, nopal and mesquite. Burros and sheep wandered across the landscape, which was so quiet you could almost hear the butterflies winging past you. Except for the occasional hum of crickets, the stillness was literally absolute.
This beauty extended to the architecture as well. The new church, cloister, and refectory were built only a few years ago, with a kind of simple, modern design that nevertheless captured the harmony of the Middle Ages, complete with wooden beams and stained glass. Seven monks and a priest constituted the permanent residents; most of them were in their late twenties. At one point, I remember looking across the table at one older monk, with his cropped hair, carefully trimmed beard, and pensive aura, and thinking that I must have seen him before, in some medieval woodcut.
Hours are observed here with great regularity: Matins at 4:30 a.m., Lauds at 6:30, mass at 7, breakfast at 8, Terce at 8:50, lunch at 1:25 p.m., Nones at 2:30, Vespers at 5:30, dinner at 6:45, Compline at 8:10. I went to Vespers every day; the chanting of the monks was so gentle, it was as though they were singing love songs, like the troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
And it was, in fact, like living during that time; really, like living in a kind of glass sphere. No outside news entered the monastery. There was no TV or radio, no newspapers or journals of any kind. I wondered if the monks knew who the current president of Mexico was, let alone of the United States.
I had brought a couple of books of a spiritual nature along with me to read, but other than that, I had decided to follow the monastic example and stay cut off from the outside world: no magazines, history books, transistor radios, or anything of the kind. As a result, the silence, and the empty space, got filled up with the contents of my psyche. Material spontaneously started drifting upward, as it were. Within two hours of arriving at the monastery I had a major breakthrough, unraveling something that I had been emotionally wrestling with for several weeks.
Two other experiences stand out. One was coming into the refectory at dinner and sitting down in front of what looked like a blue corn patty, mixed in with nopal. As I picked up my knife and fork, one of the monks slipped a CD of Ave Maria into the stereo system. The sounds filled the hall; I wavered, suddenly on the verge of tears, not able to eat for two or three minutes. (I later learned that the monks were worried I might be staging a protest against the food. The patty did, in fact, require a large dollop of salsa roja in order to liven it up.)
The second event consisted of “accidentally” locking myself out of my cell at 6:20 in the morning, on the way to the bathroom. My first reaction was: Oh dammit to hell. But then I was grateful that I was dressed and wearing clogs, and carrying a flashlight; it could have been much worse. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to put on my glasses, and I am terribly nearsighted. I also realized that this annoying event was probably not an accident: I had been embroiled in identity issues for three days now, and keys are a symbol of that. Whenever these types of issues arise for me, I typically lose my keys or wallet, or lock myself out of my car, and/or have a dream about these things. I should have known, I thought. In any case, what was there to do, in the near-freezing cold, except climb the hill up to the church and sit through Lauds and the mass? At least, I consoled myself, it was warm in the church.
I had been to mass only once before in my life, Christmas Eve 1973, at the Église St.-Séverin in Paris, a thirteenth-century structure that sits adjacent to the Sorbonne. It had been exquisite; it’s a wonder I didn’t convert to Catholicism right then and there (my complete atheism notwithstanding). The mass at the monastery was also “Parisian,” but in a rather different way: without my glasses, I couldn’t see much beyond blobs of color–an Impressionist mass, as it were. When it was over, I approached one of the monks with my problem, and he immediately got the master key and let me back into my cell.
The day before, I had been rereading one of the books I brought with me, What We May Be, by Piero Ferrucci. Ferrucci is an Italian psychotherapist, a student of Roberto Assagioli, who founded a school and technique known as Psychosynthesis. It has much in common with Jungian analysis, in fact. The section I had been reading deals with beauty:
Music [he writes] has a powerful effect on several bodily
rhythms and functions and on psychological states...neural
networks in the brain may be responsive to harmonic principles
in general. And there is such a factor within us as an “inbuilt
urge to maintain a state of intellectual and aesthetic order
and harmonic balance, essential to mental health.”
But we do not need research to know that the
magnificence of a cathedral’s rose window, the design of
Celtic manuscripts, a flower in full bloom, or the perfect
geometry of a Greek temple does not leave us unaffected.
And the moment we let ourselves be touched by beauty, that
part of us which has been badly bruised or even shattered by
the events of life may begin to be revitalized. At that moment
a true victory takes place–a victory over discouragement, a
positive affirmation against resigning ourselves to the process
of crystallization and death. That victory is also a step forward in
our growth in a very precise and literal sense, for the moment we
fully appreciate beauty we become more than we were. We live
in a moment of pure psychological health. We effortlessly build a
stronghold against the negative pressures that life inevitably brings.
But that is not all, for all stimuli–beautiful or ugly–sink into
the unconscious, where their influence becomes less immediate,
but more powerful and pervasive....
When stimuli of the same kind are repeated a number of
times–as in the case of the 15,000 killings the average American
adolescent has seen on TV*–their effects multiply and come to
generate a real psychological climate in the inner world of the
individual....
We can be[come] exposed to what Assagioli called “psychic
smog”–the prevailing mass of free-floating psychological poisons....
Earlier I referred to the monastery as a kind of glass sphere, hermetically sealed. If it keeps out the news of the modern world, it also keeps out the garbage of that world as well. It is a sphere of harmony, of beauty, designed to bring peace to the soul. As for the modern world, in particular the America of endless violence and “psychic smog,” Ferrucci follows up the above quotation with a reference to a famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch, in which the sixteenth-century artist “depicts the damned of Hell as being enveloped by an opaque crystal ball, impeding all communication with the outside world.”
And this is, very unfortunately, a fair description of the United States. The fact is that Americans live in a kind of hologram, or glass sphere with mirroring on the inside. Literally every thought they have is on the order of a programmed response, dating from the early years of the Republic: “chosen people,” “City on a Hill,” “endless frontier,” “rugged individualism,” and so on. For more than two centuries now, the same slogans and buzzwords have bounced around inside the sphere, mirroring and confirming each other. Contradictory information–represented, for example, by the analysis of that sphere and its mental processes–is never allowed to get through in any significant way. (There are hundreds of examples of this: Noam Chomsky, William Appleman Williams, Chris Hedges, etc. etc. A recent example is Walter Hixson’s The Myth of American Diplomacy, an attack on the sphere so massive in scope, and so fundamental, that only a tiny handful of Americans would be able to read it without having a nervous breakdown. It got very few reviews.) The result is the smog or poison Assagioli talks about: a culture that is not merely stupid (and stupefied), but remarkably violent, all the while celebrating how “superior” it is to all the rest–and certainly, to some medieval throwback in the hinterland of Mexico, right? In fact, when you think about it, American society is no less hermetically sealed than the world of a medieval monastery; only the content is different.
I couldn’t help remembering a film I had seen shortly before coming to the monastery, Crossing Over, about the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its persecution of alien residents, legal as well as illegal. But it proves to be about much more than the daily activities of the ICE. By the end of the film, you realize that you have been watching an X-ray of the American soul, and you are struck dumb by how violent it is, down to its very core. Destructive as well as self-destructive, it reflects a culture in a state of fear, on its last legs, lashing out at helpless victims and imaginary enemies alike. The “toxic cloud” Don DeLillo described many years ago in his brilliant novel, White Noise, now seems to have arrived in full force. This is psychological poison at its worst (or close to it).
I left Our Lady of Silence determined to carry the silence with me into my daily life: gardening, walking, meditating more, whatever. But the key issue, of course, is not my own personal life, but the dichotomy, the problem of the two separate spheres. Very few of us are cut out to live in a monastery, after all, myself included. All beauty aside, it’s not a solution for the modern world. Yet what kind of solution–to anything–is U.S. corporate-commercial culture? That much of the world seeks to emulate it doesn’t change the fact that it amounts to little more than trash, “psychic smog” that is slowly (and sometimes rapidly) killing off its inhabitants (who nevertheless can’t seem to get enough of it). If there is a third sphere, a serious institutional alternative to these two that exists in practice, not just theory, I have yet to see it. And without that, what kind of future do we finally have?
*Written ca. 1980; we can expect that the current number is by now four or five times that amount, especially if we add in input from movies, DVD’s, computer games, and the Internet.
©Morris Berman, 2010
The monastery, which I’ll call Our Lady of Silence, was located in the back woods of Mexico, in the middle of nowhere. The grounds were incredibly beautiful, dotted with agave and cactus, nopal and mesquite. Burros and sheep wandered across the landscape, which was so quiet you could almost hear the butterflies winging past you. Except for the occasional hum of crickets, the stillness was literally absolute.
This beauty extended to the architecture as well. The new church, cloister, and refectory were built only a few years ago, with a kind of simple, modern design that nevertheless captured the harmony of the Middle Ages, complete with wooden beams and stained glass. Seven monks and a priest constituted the permanent residents; most of them were in their late twenties. At one point, I remember looking across the table at one older monk, with his cropped hair, carefully trimmed beard, and pensive aura, and thinking that I must have seen him before, in some medieval woodcut.
Hours are observed here with great regularity: Matins at 4:30 a.m., Lauds at 6:30, mass at 7, breakfast at 8, Terce at 8:50, lunch at 1:25 p.m., Nones at 2:30, Vespers at 5:30, dinner at 6:45, Compline at 8:10. I went to Vespers every day; the chanting of the monks was so gentle, it was as though they were singing love songs, like the troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
And it was, in fact, like living during that time; really, like living in a kind of glass sphere. No outside news entered the monastery. There was no TV or radio, no newspapers or journals of any kind. I wondered if the monks knew who the current president of Mexico was, let alone of the United States.
I had brought a couple of books of a spiritual nature along with me to read, but other than that, I had decided to follow the monastic example and stay cut off from the outside world: no magazines, history books, transistor radios, or anything of the kind. As a result, the silence, and the empty space, got filled up with the contents of my psyche. Material spontaneously started drifting upward, as it were. Within two hours of arriving at the monastery I had a major breakthrough, unraveling something that I had been emotionally wrestling with for several weeks.
Two other experiences stand out. One was coming into the refectory at dinner and sitting down in front of what looked like a blue corn patty, mixed in with nopal. As I picked up my knife and fork, one of the monks slipped a CD of Ave Maria into the stereo system. The sounds filled the hall; I wavered, suddenly on the verge of tears, not able to eat for two or three minutes. (I later learned that the monks were worried I might be staging a protest against the food. The patty did, in fact, require a large dollop of salsa roja in order to liven it up.)
The second event consisted of “accidentally” locking myself out of my cell at 6:20 in the morning, on the way to the bathroom. My first reaction was: Oh dammit to hell. But then I was grateful that I was dressed and wearing clogs, and carrying a flashlight; it could have been much worse. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to put on my glasses, and I am terribly nearsighted. I also realized that this annoying event was probably not an accident: I had been embroiled in identity issues for three days now, and keys are a symbol of that. Whenever these types of issues arise for me, I typically lose my keys or wallet, or lock myself out of my car, and/or have a dream about these things. I should have known, I thought. In any case, what was there to do, in the near-freezing cold, except climb the hill up to the church and sit through Lauds and the mass? At least, I consoled myself, it was warm in the church.
I had been to mass only once before in my life, Christmas Eve 1973, at the Église St.-Séverin in Paris, a thirteenth-century structure that sits adjacent to the Sorbonne. It had been exquisite; it’s a wonder I didn’t convert to Catholicism right then and there (my complete atheism notwithstanding). The mass at the monastery was also “Parisian,” but in a rather different way: without my glasses, I couldn’t see much beyond blobs of color–an Impressionist mass, as it were. When it was over, I approached one of the monks with my problem, and he immediately got the master key and let me back into my cell.
The day before, I had been rereading one of the books I brought with me, What We May Be, by Piero Ferrucci. Ferrucci is an Italian psychotherapist, a student of Roberto Assagioli, who founded a school and technique known as Psychosynthesis. It has much in common with Jungian analysis, in fact. The section I had been reading deals with beauty:
Music [he writes] has a powerful effect on several bodily
rhythms and functions and on psychological states...neural
networks in the brain may be responsive to harmonic principles
in general. And there is such a factor within us as an “inbuilt
urge to maintain a state of intellectual and aesthetic order
and harmonic balance, essential to mental health.”
But we do not need research to know that the
magnificence of a cathedral’s rose window, the design of
Celtic manuscripts, a flower in full bloom, or the perfect
geometry of a Greek temple does not leave us unaffected.
And the moment we let ourselves be touched by beauty, that
part of us which has been badly bruised or even shattered by
the events of life may begin to be revitalized. At that moment
a true victory takes place–a victory over discouragement, a
positive affirmation against resigning ourselves to the process
of crystallization and death. That victory is also a step forward in
our growth in a very precise and literal sense, for the moment we
fully appreciate beauty we become more than we were. We live
in a moment of pure psychological health. We effortlessly build a
stronghold against the negative pressures that life inevitably brings.
But that is not all, for all stimuli–beautiful or ugly–sink into
the unconscious, where their influence becomes less immediate,
but more powerful and pervasive....
When stimuli of the same kind are repeated a number of
times–as in the case of the 15,000 killings the average American
adolescent has seen on TV*–their effects multiply and come to
generate a real psychological climate in the inner world of the
individual....
We can be[come] exposed to what Assagioli called “psychic
smog”–the prevailing mass of free-floating psychological poisons....
Earlier I referred to the monastery as a kind of glass sphere, hermetically sealed. If it keeps out the news of the modern world, it also keeps out the garbage of that world as well. It is a sphere of harmony, of beauty, designed to bring peace to the soul. As for the modern world, in particular the America of endless violence and “psychic smog,” Ferrucci follows up the above quotation with a reference to a famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch, in which the sixteenth-century artist “depicts the damned of Hell as being enveloped by an opaque crystal ball, impeding all communication with the outside world.”
And this is, very unfortunately, a fair description of the United States. The fact is that Americans live in a kind of hologram, or glass sphere with mirroring on the inside. Literally every thought they have is on the order of a programmed response, dating from the early years of the Republic: “chosen people,” “City on a Hill,” “endless frontier,” “rugged individualism,” and so on. For more than two centuries now, the same slogans and buzzwords have bounced around inside the sphere, mirroring and confirming each other. Contradictory information–represented, for example, by the analysis of that sphere and its mental processes–is never allowed to get through in any significant way. (There are hundreds of examples of this: Noam Chomsky, William Appleman Williams, Chris Hedges, etc. etc. A recent example is Walter Hixson’s The Myth of American Diplomacy, an attack on the sphere so massive in scope, and so fundamental, that only a tiny handful of Americans would be able to read it without having a nervous breakdown. It got very few reviews.) The result is the smog or poison Assagioli talks about: a culture that is not merely stupid (and stupefied), but remarkably violent, all the while celebrating how “superior” it is to all the rest–and certainly, to some medieval throwback in the hinterland of Mexico, right? In fact, when you think about it, American society is no less hermetically sealed than the world of a medieval monastery; only the content is different.
I couldn’t help remembering a film I had seen shortly before coming to the monastery, Crossing Over, about the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its persecution of alien residents, legal as well as illegal. But it proves to be about much more than the daily activities of the ICE. By the end of the film, you realize that you have been watching an X-ray of the American soul, and you are struck dumb by how violent it is, down to its very core. Destructive as well as self-destructive, it reflects a culture in a state of fear, on its last legs, lashing out at helpless victims and imaginary enemies alike. The “toxic cloud” Don DeLillo described many years ago in his brilliant novel, White Noise, now seems to have arrived in full force. This is psychological poison at its worst (or close to it).
I left Our Lady of Silence determined to carry the silence with me into my daily life: gardening, walking, meditating more, whatever. But the key issue, of course, is not my own personal life, but the dichotomy, the problem of the two separate spheres. Very few of us are cut out to live in a monastery, after all, myself included. All beauty aside, it’s not a solution for the modern world. Yet what kind of solution–to anything–is U.S. corporate-commercial culture? That much of the world seeks to emulate it doesn’t change the fact that it amounts to little more than trash, “psychic smog” that is slowly (and sometimes rapidly) killing off its inhabitants (who nevertheless can’t seem to get enough of it). If there is a third sphere, a serious institutional alternative to these two that exists in practice, not just theory, I have yet to see it. And without that, what kind of future do we finally have?
*Written ca. 1980; we can expect that the current number is by now four or five times that amount, especially if we add in input from movies, DVD’s, computer games, and the Internet.
©Morris Berman, 2010
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