Defining Deviancy Down

Dear Friends,

I was recently contacted by a reporter for the New York Times, who asked me to clarify the relationship between culture and politics. Below, my reply.--mb


Dear Kirk,

Thank you for writing. Yours is a great question, both in the sense of being very important, and in the sense of being vast. In fact, to provide you with a decent reply, I think I'd need to go off and do about six years of research, and I'm guessing your deadline is a bit sooner than that. The problem here is that there is no definitive pattern, or even set of patterns, I know of, for the relationship between culture and politics. In some cases, it makes no difference at all that I can see: the British decision of a few years back to outlaw fox hunting, for example. A similar ban in NYC, a few years ago, on smoking in bars and restaurants. There is a lot of stuff in that category.

At the other extreme, we might consider the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th century, or in contemporary Northern Ireland. These are/were cultural conflicts with huge political consequences, quite obviously. Hatred of Jews in Germany during the 1930s, and the cultural campaign against them; e.g. movies (which I've seen) comparing Jews to insects, crawling through sacks of wheat, poisoning the food supply, i.e. the larger "healthy" German culture. As one historian famously remarked, "ideas have consequences."

As for the things you point to, such as capital punishment or homosexual marriage, I could offer some guesses, but that's all they would be.

I do, however, know of one pattern by which culture impacts politics, a pattern identified by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the phrase, "defining deviancy down." In other words, what is socially unacceptable at one point, becomes perfectly OK--or at least, tolerated--a decade or so later. I used to ride the Metro quite often when I lived in Washington, DC, and watched how increasingly, people put their feet up on the seats, or sprawled out on them. Cell phone users could care less who is listening to them, so one now has to suffer through dinner with a friend in a restaurant while 3 feet away, someone is yakking loudly about their personal life. The Met, in NY, used to ban cell phone use in the galleries; now, one has to look at Rembrandt or Van Gogh while someone stands next to you, describing their recent gall bladder operation. Visitors even talk on their phones in St. Patrick's Cathedral. In schools, rudeness to teachers, and violence toward classmates, has become commonplace. Learning for learning's sake is a thing of the past, something "quaint," for patsies. There is a long list of this sort of behavior, and in fact a long list of books on incivility in American life (Stephen Carter's "Civility" is a good place to start).

There is also a large literature documenting a complete lack of interest in community and the larger society in the US, and how, following Moynihan's prescription, this is now taken for granted. The most famous of these is Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (this for the period 1965-95), but you might also check out Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City," among others.

The impact of these things on politics is that politics becomes more or less irrelevant. We don't really have a society any more, so in that context, what is it that politics could possibly accomplish? Most Americans don't vote, and I doubt that very many, in their heart of hearts, really believe things are going to get better over time, regardless of which party is in office. The result of incivility and loss of community, of a world in which (e.g.) violence in our high schools is now regarded as simply a fact of life, and learning and erudition regarded as jokes, is cultural death, cynicism, loss of belief in America at large. "Democracy" becomes little more than a slogan. Bill Clinton or Barack Obama can talk about "hope," but all this is nothing more than empty rhetoric, because there can be no hope in the face of such large-scale solipsism and narcissism. Politics cannot be meaningful when the huge majority of the population has turned away from "the commons," from any participation or even concern about the larger society (which politicians such as Reagan and Thatcher claimed didn't even exist), and into private worlds of shopping, Prozac, TV, the Internet, religious fundamentalism, and the like. And this certainly does constitute an historical pattern, whether we are talking about the end of the Roman Empire, or the disintegration of the American one. Indeed, probably the greatest factor in the collapse of a civilization is spiritual death; and as Moynihan pointed out, we are seeing more and more of it every day.

As for your own question regarding the resolution of all this: take a guess.

Anyway, that's the best I can do on short notice. If there is anything in the above that might be useful to you, feel free to take what you need.

With best wishes,

Morris Berman

The View from Darien

Dear Friends:

This by way of a change of pace...My German publisher wrote to say that he is going to be editing a book of short contributions by writers, journalists, and actors, on the subject of the first book they ever read, and how it changed their lives. Below, my contribution. Enjoy!

I suppose everybody has a shortlist of books that changed their lives. My own amounts to about 7 or 8 books, I would guess. But there is one that deserves a special place of honor, because it was my first, which I read at age 3: Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. I was reading it with my mother, and we came across a word I didn’t know: eddy. As it turned out, my mother didn’t know it either (or so she said), so we looked it up in the dictionary. "Whirlpool," was the definition. But the fascinating thing that I took away from Defoe’s tale was that one could explore whole new worlds, worlds that were strange and unknown, and that it was not only safe to do so, but even fascinating. Furthermore, there were guides along the way to help you, such as dictionaries. And finally, I had it imprinted on my tender little brain that reading itself was exciting; that it was the key to a larger world.

That sense of revelation stayed with me, and shaped my life. I particularly remember revelations about revelation itself, such as the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," from The Arabian Nights, which I read at age 13. Ali Baba comes to the covered entrance to a cave, and learns the magic words that open the door: "Open Sesame!" Or, in college now, reading John Keats’ poem, "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer," which concludes with the lines:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific–and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

It is now six decades since I first read Robinson Crusoe, and I am still looking out at the world with a wild surmise.

"A Public Affair"

Dear Friends,

I just did an hour-long interview with WORT-FM in Madison, WI, that might interest you. I haven't tried it myself, but the host told me after the show that the program could be downloaded by going to www.wortfm.org, clicking on Archives, and then going to the listing for "A Public Affair," 23 October 2007. I personally felt the hour went by in the blink of an eye. Most of the time is devoted to call-ins and my responses. Enjoy!

-mb

Interview on WYNE-FM, 23 July 2007

This is an interview I did with Gary Null, on New York's local NPR station. Link as follows:

http://media.podcastingmanager.com/86473-83093/Media/600100.null072307.mp3

Interview on WYPR-FM, 11 June 2007

Dear Friends:

Here is the link to an hour-long interview I did on the Marc Steiner Show, on Baltimore's NPR station, WYPR-FM. Note that it took me 25 mins. to download this; I sincerely hope your own computer is faster! As follows:


http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wypr/local-wypr-597016.mp3

Review of DAA in the New Haven Review of Books, June 2007

HOW BAD IS IT?

In 1984 Ronald Reagan announced, with characteristic indifference to fact, that it was "morning in America." A quarter-century later, the twilight, then already perceptible, has deepened. The international financial position of the United States is ruinous. Globally, attitudes toward American policy range from misgiving to loathing. The foreseeable consequences of climate change and environmental pollution range from painful to catastrophic. For most Americans (especially the tens of millions without health insurance), medical care is the worst in any advanced industrial society. Economic insecurity is epidemic; overwork and high stress are the rule rather than the exception; inequality is at an all-time high; trust in government is at an all-time low (though perhaps not low enough, in the present circumstances). The (until recently) governing party openly aspires to permanent one-party rule and a Caesarist executive. Civic virtue, lately renamed "social capital," is waning; neighborliness has dwindled to the point of near-anomie. Functional illiteracy is rampant: in most non-affluent school districts, the public schools are not merely ineffectual but often unsafe as well. Nearly half of all Americans believe that the earth is 10,000 years old or less and that angels and other supernatural beings regularly intervene in terrestrial affairs. The average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, thirty seconds attending a play or concert, twenty-five seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television. And even Americans who don’t watch television are perfused by a stream of commercial messages so intense and ubiquitous as to constitute a culture (in the biological as well as social sense) of consumption. Compared with the imagined noonday brilliance of that vibrant idyll, Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, the prospects for contemporary American civilization are heartbreakingly bleak.

Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (Norton) was one of the most important books published in 2006, though little noted thanks to a peevish and uncomprehending review by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. It is a sequel to Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture (2000), a shorter, more impressionistic book that persuasively evoked contemporary parallels to the collapse of Roman imperial civilization and suggested that, like the Greco-Roman heritage, Enlightenment ideals may survive the coming era of globalized barbarism underground, in quasi-monastic networks and communities.

Although the play of "twilight" and "dark" in the two books’ titles implies forward (or backward) motion, Dark Ages America does not try to go beyond The Twilight of American Culture so much as underneath it. The earlier book was primarily descriptive; the new one is diagnostic as well. Berman is a distinguished historian of medieval and early modern culture, and he imports from his study of alchemy the maxim: as above, so below. That is, the macrocosm and the microcosm – the visible dynamics of global political economy and the subtleties of culture and social psychology; grand strategy and the grain of everyday life – reflect and determine each other.

Thus, for example, the unrestricted movement of capital, the ultima ratio of American foreign and domestic policy, requires weak or corrupt – in any case, acquiescent – governments, since otherwise they might try to improve their bargaining position by combining with other governments and encouraging labor organization. Ineffectual governments and labor unions in turn require a weakening of impulses toward cooperation, solidarity, and citizen initiative. Very helpful toward that end is the redefinition of the good life as a life of continuous and increasing individual consumption – which, since it is a false definition, necessitates unremitting indoctrination by means of advertising. Expanding consumption in turn requires technological innovation, mass production, a population willing to put up with insecure, regimented, and frequently stupefying work (the effects of which are assuaged by entertainments only a little more refined and wholesome than Roman circuses), and the exploitation of resources on a vast scale. And these requirements of expanding consumption in turn promote the concentration and mobility of capital. In Berman’s apt formulation: "Global process, local fallout."

Whether or not the elites who profit by the degradation of culture and character intend these consequences, or even perceive them, is beside the point. Whatever anyone may intend, forms of life produce individuals adapted to them, just as physical environments do. "Civilizations are a package deal," Berman observes. Much of the value of Dark Ages America lies in tracing the adaptations and interdependencies implicit in the civilization we have evolved.

The ethos of American individualism is Berman’s particular preoccupation. It has frontier roots but is also an effect (as well as a contributing cause) of the victory of automobiles and suburbanization over mass transit and European-style city planning. "The relentless American habit of choosing the individual solution over the collective one," Berman writes, underlies "the design of our cities, including the rise of a car culture, the growth of the suburbs, and the nature of our architecture, [which] has had an overwhelming impact on the life of the nation as a whole, reflecting back on all the issues discussed [in this book]: work, children, media, community, economy, technology, globalization, and, especially, US foreign policy. The physical arrangements of our lives mirror the spiritual ones."

American foreign policy all too clearly expresses this preference for "individual solutions over collective ones." The basic principle of world order – willingness to accept limits on national sovereignty in deference to international law and public opinion – has always been unpopular here. As a result, American international behavior has been so high-handed that, even among normally sympathetic foreign elites, the US is widely regarded as a rogue nation and the chief threat to global peace and welfare. And individualism affects the substance as well as the style of US foreign policy. The culture of cars, suburbs, and shopping is resource-intensive, and in particular, energy-intensive. Control of global energy resources has therefore been the linchpin of US policy since World War II, as Berman shows.

From macrocosm to microcosm: the texture of daily life and the contours of individual psychology within a civilization are intimately related to its science and technology. In the first chapter of Dark Ages America, Berman elaborates a concept borrowed from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: "liquid modernity." This names a society "characterized by speed, fluidity, and transience … a permanent state of contingency." It’s true that this acceleration has been underway since the Industrial Revolution and that Marx discoursed brilliantly on it in the Communist Manifesto. But the pace of social change has increased exponentially in the last few decades, thanks to both computer technology and the demise of the Bretton Woods international economic order, which freed capital to move around the world instantaneously. Along with all the blessings of electronic technology have come enormous, unprecedented stresses on our psyches and metabolisms. "Everything in contemporary society discourages inwardness," the literary critic Sven Birkerts has written. Berman illustrates copiously.

Dark Ages America is a synthesis. All the elements of Berman’s critique have been made before, though they are assembled here with rare skill and comprehensiveness. What is perhaps most original is Berman’s frank admission that he sees no way out. Indignation is usually followed by exhortation, but not in this book or its predecessor. It’s not that Berman sees nothing valuable in contemporary American society and no one struggling against the trends he has identified. He simply doesn’t hold out much hope for them. He regrets John Kerry’s defeat and no doubt welcomed the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006; but he also points out that "in the process of decline a civilization may, from time to time, rally for a while; but it is the overall trajectory, the structural properties of the situation, that ultimately determine the outcome."

Just what form the new Dark Ages may take does not emerge from Berman’s account. Contrary to fashionable demurrers, the Dark Ages were indeed dark: a half-millennium-long, nearly complete eclipse of reason, which classical culture barely and fortuitously survived. It is bound to be different this time around. Then, the imagination was starved; now it will be smothered: by commercial images, by ersatz sensations, by media babble, by corporate and governmental doublespeak. Still, we have at least learned a lot about information storage and retrieval. Maybe those skills will also prove useful for imagination storage and retrieval.

It is not much easier to accept the death of one’s culture than one’s own death – harder, perhaps, if one has had a happy life and known intellectual or aesthetic pleasure. That is why Berman wrote this book, though convinced of its futility. Thankfully, he cites a few lines from the ending of Gore Vidal’s Julian that temper the pain a little:

"With Julian, the light went out, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of time’s mystery and man’s love of light."



--George Scialabba is a book critic and the author of Divided Mind (Arrowsmith Press).