The Twilight of American Culture

Rating:
Summary: Although not paticularly agreeable, a obligatory read
Review: Morris Berman's Twilight of American culture is a truly brilliant comment on western civilization. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and deeply recommend it to those individuals who are perfectly content in living in the largest imperial force in the world: America.
Berman's illustration of current America is beautifully accurate. However I believe his diagnosis of western decline (coupled with his theory of survival entitled: the monastic option) is a little farfetched. I believe it is inevitable that the American culture, whatever that is, will crumble and mutate into something else and the change is approaching sooner than most think, but not quite as bluntly as Berman states it. Western civilization will fall but I do not believe it will be as drastic as Berman makes it out to be, the western dark ages will be a lot subtler and will only last a fraction of previous dark ages followed by a prosperous renaissance.
Berman's novel may be a contorted and exaggerated documentation and hypothesis on the US of A but it is nonetheless a well backed argument and a very interesting read. I highly recommend everybody in America to read this book and until then have fun letting MCworld run your disintegrating society, which is abandoning its values and replacing cultural heritage with hype and marketing, and your life.

Rating:
Summary: interesting ideas--some major problems though
Review: I agree with the author that modern culture is mind-numbing and deterrent to any sort of intellectualism, but I don't think it's quite the apocalypse he's describing. For one, it's true that the average person is incredibly stupid, and that a tiny number of people read books--but this has always been the case, and as far as I can tell it was worse before. People always make reference to the hordes clamoring at the docks for the latest installment of Dicken's Little Dorrit, but we need to keep in mind that even then the majority of people could not read a word. Also, Dickens aside, the majority of popular works then and now are sentimental bilge--compare Susan Warner's "The Wide Wide World," on the verge of outselling the bible in 1852, with the biggest bestsellers of today and you won't see a vast difference. But I suppose it probably is the case that people who would have been reading Susan Warner 150 years ago, for lack of any more mindless entertainment, have been easily drawn in by the television and so forth and now barely read at all. As for readers of serious works, though, works containing some level of sophisticated philosophical content--the readership of such works has always been very tiny, and remains so. I think the real problem we're encountering is not a decline in literacy, but a simple breakdown of the idea of a singular Culture held by the elite--this is not an attack on a more multicultural viewpoint, but simply the realization that without an aristocracy of patronage and support, and a reflection in "lower" society of the superiority of the "higher," the crassest forms of entertainment have been able to raise as high as they like. Basically, it means that once upon a time the society recognized the superiority of the highest culture, even if very few partook of it, but then, with the proliferation of mass media, that came to an end. It should also be noted, though, that much of what we consider to be the greatest philosophy and literature was written by people who were exiles from the dominant "Culture" of their time. For instance the system of the Academy and Salon for French art in the 19th century, and the various artists who we value higher than nearly anything put out by that Academy who were not allowed to have any part in it. So really, it's a far more complex issue than simply that of a decline from greatness. There's more I'd like to say about that, but this review is getting very long...so I just hope people will keep these things in mind when they read this book.