The Twilight of American Culture

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Summary: Hope for those who feel lost in this Brave New World
Review: 'The Twilight of American Culture' is a tale of vision and optimism in an universe where anything that does not touch on commerce is being suppressed. Content is rapidly replaced in our Western society by form. Meaning becomes invested in surface.
For any thinking person, the pressures of ersatz in the way our environment is conceived and presented, become intolerable.
Instead of real feeling one is confronted by a facsimile. In lieu
of rational motivations, people submit to what is predigested for them in the dominant culture. From Derrida whose concept of
simulacra pointed this out, to Berman's 'Twilight', more and more awareness and resistance emerges, though as Berman correctly points out, this remains a solitary pursuit. This is a most hopeful book and maybe it will serve to show that we are not alone, that despite his concept of monastic cultural transference, that if enough people see the bondage under which they live, we will experience a revolt. Highly recommended reading for those who feel an unease of this world.

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Summary: Great Read
Review: A fine addition to good books, but the author leads the reader astray just a tad. For example, he says the popularity of New Age books are an example of how American is in decline. Well, I agree, but New Age books have been selling well for a long time. Not long ago, I read an essay by a journalist written in the 1920's and he was lamenting what Berman has to say today about New Age titles. Books about the occult, etc are here to stay, but they are not a product of our modern time, since they have been around for many years.

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Summary: Sounds like the way I've been living for years....
Review: Briefly, the author holds that American society has started its period of decadence and decline, and that there is nothing that we can do to halt it. This is the fate of all great civilizations and empires- and America is no exception.
However, he holds that we can preserve our heritage by individually adopting the lifestyle of monks. This would be simular to the way monks and monesteries preserved the best of Greek and Roman culture after the collapse of Rome- but Berman holds that the real hope lies with individual "monks" and not organized movements.
Sounds like the way I've been living for years....
My only criticism of Berman's work is that his ideal is Enlightenment rationalism- he seems very critical of spiritual and transcendental traditions (he groups them all together as "New Age"- and worthless.) While he does address Sorokin's predictions for a coming age of faith, he dismises it, or at least he holds that such a spiritual age would be undesirable. Personally, I see Enlightenment hyper-rationalism as what planted the seeds of our current materialistic hell in the first place.
Anyway, this is one of the most important and well thought out books that I've read in a long time, even if I don't agree with everything in it.

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Summary: Lots of valid points, but too apocalytic.
Review: I liked the points that Berman made in his text: the deterioration of expectations, if I were to put it in a nutshell, due to globalization, mass marketing commercialism and on and on. However, while reading this book, I was also taking an audio course (not in a "distance learning" program, like those Berman justifiably criticizes) on 19th and 20th century European thought. In short, few if any of Berman's ideas are new ones. At the end of the 19th century, philosophers and scholars asked, "Can we even survive this onslaught of superficiality?" For what it's worth, we did survive it. And I suspect that history has repeatedly brought forth critics who've asked in essence that same thing.

Actually, we DO live in a time of diminishing expectations. And the onslaught of the "New Age" is diminishing them all the further. But it's not clear to me whether Berman is supportive of the Enlightenment or decrying it. He seems to be an enthusiastic supporter of Enlightenment principles in one paragraph, yet goes on in the next complaining of the growth of "scientism." And that's an expression that many a New Ager uses. Indeed, I argue that the foundation of the New Age fantasy is that the world is a complicated place. If you've ever tried to understand quantum theory, for example, unless you're a pretty well-endowed physicist or engineer, it's pretty baffling. So the New Age is a comfortable regression. You know, it's not THAT complicated. It can seem much simpler with a little specialized jargon and a few words (note: "quantum" and "paradigm") to make the user seem erudite Science is the best tool to dispel that silly nonsense, hence New Agers and the like condemning it as scientism, as if the scientific process has become a religion, an article of faith, rather than a reliable method.

Berman's history of the decline of an educated public in the dark ages and the monks of that time having recorded what became the intellectual basis for a later era was interesting, and I suspect quite accurate. He points out that the monks saved this information without advocating it. Indeed, they didn't understand what they were saving. Had they understood it, their theology may have forced them to reject it! And the reference reminded me of a book I read years ago by none other than a friar who argued, in essence, that consuming less--in Berman's context being less a participant in the mindless commercial materialism--is in itself a revolution. Thomas Merton, another real monk, also referred to the "desert," that monastic environment where we reflect and find meaning surpassing the merely material world. However, I frankly didn't have too much use for some of Berman's contemporary monastic equivalents. He mentioned, for example, the director of one Washington-based organization. While I like the work the organization does, most of its fellows are preppies with Ivy League graduate degrees. Their credibility is dubious to me then, as "monks." He also refers to Frances Fox Piven in the same way. But I find her to be caught in an academic fantasy land far from the "real" life most of us are forced to live. Again, far from monastic. While I may respect the scholarly stature of some of these individuals, I don't see them as having rejected that culture. They just represent another dimension of it.

Some of his other "monks," e.g., Michael Moore, I have more respect for, though I suspect the staffs of some of these latter day revolutionaries may challenge their bosses' status in that position.

Oh, and society has repeatedly fostered such "monks" too. That's often what it means to be creative, to grow beyond the norm. Look at Gaugin, Thoreau, as two extremes of countless others. Again, nothing new.

One other point I thought of while reading the book is that many people whom I consider to be political opportunists and quacks see themselves as the "monks" to which Berman refers. For instance, I particularly liked Berman's reference to a characterisic of the the world-challenging "monks" as not bringing attention to themselves. Unfortunately, most of those I've worked with in the political realm who consider themselves "monks" are hams eager for the limelight. They are also self-indulgent to a comical degree. What, in fact, turned me against that "monastic" realm in which I participated through most of my professional life is that these would-be monks decry the consumption of others, yet they consume whatever is convenient to them, from outrageously expensive "organic" foods and "alternative" medical practices, to computer systems to lucrative retirement plans. So their consumption is of attention and convenient and/or symbolic materialism. The text itself does little to minimize that mythology, and that I regret.

Indeed, this is what I commented in my review of Ellis's "The Dark Side of the Left" and other fine volumes to which Berman makes reference in his text.

In the last chapter, Berman offered possible alternatives to the present culture which he feels is bound to collapse. First, I think he's a dreamer. Sorry, but it won't collapse. Between powerful corporate hierarchies and the whole stock market culture, it'll be here for some time. But the alternatives, taken from contemporary philosophy and science fiction were nonetheless interesting and--while Berman denies it--rather Utopian.

Overall, despite my less positive comments, Berman made some valuable observations. And overall I agree with him. Yes, for instance, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing, and that is bound to have consequences. But if you're looking for an insight-filled tract to lead you to a new "paradigm," you won't find it here.

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Summary: A Must Read
Review: I loved this book. Berman does a good job in explaining the ills of American culture. For example, when he says that 60% of Americans have never read a book and only 6 % read as much as one book or more per year my jaw suddenly dropped. The book business is a rather small business when you really think about it. Moreover, the author says America has around 290 million people, but 120 million of them are funtionally illiterate. Hahahah Good grief Charlie Brown. But I have to say that when Berman reports that 12% of Americans named Joan of Arc as Noah's wife I just could not stop laughing. What does this mean? For one, it means publishers are in BIG trouble. If kids today don't read for pleasure where will tomorrow's readers come from? Berman is right publishers only like to publish what makes money and sells well, so future authors unite and be sure to write about new age or get to know a celebrity fast. The death of the printed word is almost certain, especially with the advent of HDTV, high band-width computer games and the like. Yes, Berman is right America is declining at a rapid pace.

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Summary: Well Done
Review: Since when is it reqired to write books that build to an optimistic puchline? Such a fruitless norm indeed... We need not all be activists. And not all stories have a happy, or even hopeful ending. This is a must read for the blind flag-waving masses. (though of course who wants to read a book that doesn't offer a solution...and the truth is just to hard to digest)

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Summary: Individually Inspiring.
Review: for individuals who struggle with mass/consumer culture in contemporary America, Dr Berman's book is a sobering analysis of that culture, as well as an inspiration to those who cherish and wish to preserve the more worthwhile aspects of human endeavor & tradition (i.e., history, art, literature, etc).

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Summary: A Wake-up Call to the Sloppy-Minded
Review: Morris Berman has written a challenging and thoughtful book, a book which should be read by everyone who calls himself or herself educated. It calls to task all those who unthinkingly commercialize very aspect of our lives, turn education into unchallenging entertainment and blithely hand over our democratic process to those, mostly the big corporations, with the largest purses. The book was written too early for the Enron scandal, for instance. But read the book together with details of Enron and and the emasculation of the Smithsonian Institution, and I defy any thoughtful person not to be terrified at the direction our democracy and society are headed.

My only critism is that The Twilight of American Civilization is too U.S oriented. This process, under the onslaught of American pop culture and crass commercialism, is well under way in Europe and elsewhere in the world. There are few oases of academic rigor or the thoughtful arts left for us to retire to.

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Summary: Not Groundbreaking, But Vital
Review: In his new "Twilight of American Culture," Berman's approach--at once harrowing and humorous, accessible and informative--conveys the familiar symptoms of an American mailaise: "McWorld," as Berman aptly labels it. While a far more original, imaginative and involving account of the great corporate slob that is America can be found in Alan Lightman's brilliant, recent novel, "The Diagnosis,"Berman's book stands as a necessary and forthright excavation of the American ethos.

The disease is the increasingly impersonal, mass-market conglomerate digesting any suggestion of uniqueness, inquisitiveness or energy in each individual, replacing those virtues with such poisons as advertisement, bureaucracy and a government whose address is Bill Gates's wallet. The problem with this otherwise good, learned and brazen book is Berman's frequent retreat to rather tired themes such as an appalling American literacy rate compounded by an increasing interest in Hallmark literature and Deepok Chopra seminars, stunning failures in American education accompanied by the death of the "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" ethic, where a young person's motivation for going to college is not to learn, not to foster any semblance of curiosity or interest in Berman's much-vaunted classics, but rather to paste fancy letters at the end of their names to show to the Bossman, who will hopefully accomodate them with salaries that can support cable tv bills, Versace suits and 'Nsync tickets; "Anodynes," as Berman correctly identifies them.

Berman explores more fertile, original territory when he links the enlightenment period to the swarming onslaught of corporate culture. While we may have all heard the claim that within every great civilization's virtues lie the seeds of its demise, Berman's patient explanation of the process by which pride in the individual, in human reason, and education, whelped consumerism still strikes a chord. Berman distinguishes between "a good enlightenment and a bad one. The former is the Age of Reason, the world of Hume and Voltaire. . . . The latter is the modern obsession with qualification, control, and the domination of the natural world" (Berman 114). This idea that man's most beautiful achievements eventually errode into parodies of themselves runs like a river throughout the book, and when Berman applies this notion to a linkage of the enlightenment era to contemporary American society, the book becomes particularly resonant: "It was during the twentieth century that science, technology, and industry effectively merged into something approaching a unified enterprise, and scientific research lies at the heart of corporate research and development, manufacture, and economic expansion. Even a casual look at the Fortune 500 companies underscores this. Rubber, steel, television, automobile production, the software and information industry--the list goes on and on," Berman asserts (113).

Ultimately, Berman's "Monastic option" is appealing because it is stripped of its idealistic, religious connotations and redefined to confront contemporary concerns. Berman's monastic option recalls the Kantian vision of a sense of the intrinsic value of each human being, of each individual as a potential contribution to society--not economically, but culturally, spirtually, artistically and otherwise. The endeavor for those who come away from Berman's book with a renewed sense of hope, despit the author's rather grave prophecies, is to resist the tempting bliss of conformity, to resist becoming an economic unit in favor of your own dignity, individuality and honesty. Berman's book takes the first step, it helps readers recognize the enemy, and in recognizing the impending disorder flourishing under our noses, we may have a better chance at productive resistance, at living more honest and human lives. While books such as Berman's are now tending more towards familiar warnings rather than fresh observations, they are still quite necessary reminders that we are human beings, not ratings statistics, dollar signs and poll numbers. Let's hope Berman's cadre of social critics maintains its energy, presence and effort.

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Summary: A book with a punch
Review: Sometimes a book just hits you. Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture hit me hard and I'm grateful for it. His vision of the immediate future is a downward spiral for the U.S. and for the "Americanisation" of the rest of the world. Yet he offers a perverse reassurance to those who quietly go about maintaining the values of the Enlightenment in their everyday lives and work. A thought provoking and stimulating read with a wealth of references.