The Twilight of American Culture

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Summary: Read along with his 'The Reenchantment of Nature'
Review: If the pessimism is too much, Mr. Bermans previous book 'The Reenchantment of Nature' might offer some respite. Ever since reading that book almost 20 years ago now, I have looked forward to a sequel, and am not disappointed!

Personally, since reading HG Wells' 'The Time Machine' as a kid, I have needed no convincing in envisioning a future Dark Age when benighted and simple-minded Eloi will live at the whim of the technocratic Morloks.

Yet, perhaps, even the Morloks may forget their craft! Who can say?

Imagine, 100 years from now, people looking back on the fading magazine pictures of the Space Shuttle and PC's with wonder and confusion as the electric light flickers overhead with the coming of another power outage that no one will know how to fix.

Monasticism might not be a bad idea. I wonder if Mr. Berman was inspired by the scifi story 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'?

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Summary: Americans Are Not Victims---The Fault Lies Within Ourselves
Review: I reject the central theme of Morris Berman's "The Twilight of American Culture." It may be right to claim, as also does Daniel Bell and others, that the inherent contradictions within Capitalism encourage a lowering of the values and intellectual standards mandatory in sustaining a viable democracy. This is indeed our paradoxical achilles heel. Capitalist entities give us what we truly demand. These products and services may be beneficial---or instead send us to hell in a hand basket. It is our choice to make and we have to live with the consequences. Does Berman believe that government bureaucrats should make these decisions for us? He doesn't say. Is Berman perhaps even hinting that people like him should decide what's best for everyone? If so, I possess more faith in our imperfect, but adequately dependable Democratic Capitalist milieu.

Most adults can choose more meaningful and higher forms of culture if they so desire. Even the poor are normally able to avail themselves of high brow offerings. Used books are mostly sold for pennies off their original price. Major museums usually offer at least one free day a week. Are people being coerced when they opt to click on silly TV sit coms instead of PBS? Thus, unlike people of the Dark Ages, we are not victims. Anonymous corporations and conspiratorial forces are not the enemy. We are responsible for our own predicament. I do not share Berman's dire perception that we are descending "into real barbarism." Americans face many challenges at the beginning of this new century. However, I am confident that we have sufficient moral and intellectual resources to overcome them. Berman has written a book of complaint that deserves a reading. It would have been far better, though, if the author invested more time and effort focussing upon solutions. Berman fails to offer any significant alternatives on how we may better guarantee our secular salvation. I hope he does so in his next book.

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Summary: We all know that what he writes is truth.
Review: On the campus of Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, stands an obelisk that is a memorial to Confederate war dead. On the obelisk is written a brief passage from Thucydides' "Peloponnesian War." The passage is in Greek and only in Greek; there is no English translation anywhere on the somber stone. This is significant in that when this obelisk was erected in the late 19th or early 20th century, it was assumed that the entering college freshmen would be able to read and recognize the work in its original language. At one time in this country, one could not even consider going to college unless one had a thorough education in the classics and could read the languages in which they were written. Today, there are no such standards. Our universities are little more than four more years of high school.

In "The Twilight of American Culture," Mr. Berman makes a point of pointing out that this devolution of the American mind and education is part of a long trend that has as its basis factors like corporate commodification of knowledge, general cultural rot, the prevalence of television, and poor funding of education and the arts. The American culture, he says, has been stripped of its intellectual substance and coated with glitz and kitsch. Capitalism and consumerism have become, finally, our only lasting values and Americans now "feel themselves" in terms of what they can sell and buy, rather than what they can think and do. In short, most of us are spiritually and intellectually dead.

Grim picture, to be sure. But what is to be done in this world of Jenny McCarthies and Big Macs? He draws parallels, in his book, between the decline of the Roman Empire and this American cultural rot. And like the Benedictines of the dark ages, those who are concerned about this rot must remove themselves spiritually from this rot and seek to preserve the cerebral. Berman writes that the dwindling numbers of true intellectuals should "drop out" of this buffoonish, plastic society and "preserve" the intellectual tradition of the West in a "monastic" fashion. He writes that grass roots activism is somewhat unrealistic and that nothing can stop this technology and entertainment-fueled train from derailing. As cynical as it sounds, I have to agree.

Some want to believe that human curiosity and dignity will win out in this war of character versus crap. But in this age of Benny Hinn, New Age Bookstores, and Trickle-Down economics, hope seems to be dimming fast. Morris Berman may be a prophet foretelling the demise of the American mind. Perhaps we would do well to join him in the desert. An A+ Recommended Read.

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Summary: Brilliant Attack
Review: Simply put, Dr. Berman has written a cogent and reasoned discourse regarding the utter vacuity of the Postmodernist and Deconstructionist Schools.

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Summary: Intelligent, true, brave and long due book
Review: I was amazed by the book! Even though I have expected by the title and the covers what I will see inside, it surpassed ten times all my expectations. First of all, it gave me the belief that this society is alive and it will fix itself. This is an optimistic event, that the book has seen light. We would have been completely dead as a society, if noone had written such a book. It expresses the most important trait of the human, its consciousness. To be noncritical, is lack of consciousness. Whoever can read and understand such a book has hope to improve himself and the society. The ignorance, that is all around us, and is growing day by day is destroying us all. If someone thinks he is above the others, and benefits from their ignorance, finds himself ignorant even more. If there is no intelligent audience one cannot express his views to anyone. He lacks stimuli and dies also intelectually. I think the point is made wanderfully, by showing this process in the middle ages, and today, when in order to teach in university, professor needs to use kindergarten techniques to be liked. We need the truth, to be able to cure and improve ourselves. This book is about the truth. But how many people can hear it? Does it make waves in the society? No! Why? It is described in the book. The people are kept ignorant, so they cannot hear the truth and rebel against their ignorance. The goal in this society is achieved. The rule is ensured to those that have it. Lets everyone else die. Education, education, education! That is what the people need. The educated person canoot be fooled by some stupid ad of any giant corporation, by violent movie, by false political statements. If there is education, everything else is fixed. The corporate brainwashig will be impossible. Then the corporation goes where is its place - producing goods that we all need. So the educated person is the only person. Everyone else is just moving trough the life. In this country the education is made to be against a lot of money, for difference with the developed countries in the world. This is a third world phenomenon. It is desighned to keep the people ignorant. And the people should rebel against that. They should want their education, because this is their first human right, not the right to carry gun, like someone wants to tell them. I will carry a diploma, lets someone else carries a gun, and let see who will succed in life. The basic human rights are: the right of free education, free health care, and free child care. Because if they are not free they are not rights, but privileges for the rich. These three basic human rights are denied in the United States, but not in Europe and Canada. Why the americans should suffer? Are they guilty for something and they are being punished for that? It is out of our mind, why this is happening. We need more information about the other countries. We need to take what is positive from them, but not to blind our eyes. The only thing we need to do is to fight for Education, for better Education, for free Education! By rising everyone around us we raise ourselves.

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Summary: Provocative But Flawed Discussion Of Contemporary Culture!
Review: This provocative, interesting and thoughtful book by social critic Morris Berman is both absorbing and troubling. Mr. Berman is right on target in much of what he contends in his quite literate and entertaining assessment of the sorry state of our contemporary intellectual and cultural malaise befuddling American society. Indeed, with mind-numbing statistics he effectively illustrates just how rampant the growing public ignorance is, and although I would question the meaning of some of the statistics used in marshaling his argument, I would not fault his conclusion that we are in the midst of a frightening decline in our collective understanding of how the work operates and what our meaningful place within it is. We are indeed now living lives that come increasingly close to comprising the brave new world of Aldous Huxley's frightening 1930s novel.

Yet, Berman doesn't use this analysis as a point of departure to discuss the nature of what must come next to rescue us from this situation. Instead, he prefers to "give up the ghost" and initiates a passionate discussion of why it is critical to preserve the values and treasures of the Enlightenment. Wow! Hasn't anyone told him that, as novelist and poet Leonard Cohen once put it, you don't polish windows in a car wreck? Worrying about the accumulated treasures of intellectual pursuit at this point seems to be both curious and baffling. So, while I share his passionate concern for preserving the best from the past, I am baffled by his choosing to discuss or consider the much more pressing contemporary issue of how intelligent individuals can either moderate the alarming "dumbing-down" of American culture or prepare themselves for what he refers to as a coming dark age. With maddening casualness, he neglects to flesh out what the nature of this coming "dark age" might be, what possible factors might act as a trigger for it, or what we can do, either as individuals or in terms of social action, in the face of it. Given his concerns for the values of the Enlightenment, why not stand to fight for them now, when it counts? Instead, he engages in a feeble plea for proper appreciation of the classics and the intellectual proclivities such an orientation provides for. All this as preparation for an extended musing over what a new secular intellectual monastic movement might consist of.

This is not to deny the accuracy of Mr. Berman's heartfelt concerns for such intellectual preoccupations, but rather to bemoan his seeming lack of concern for what this means for the millions of people who will suffer from its collapse and his total disregard of the meaning behind the horrendous cultural crisis we now face. Likewise, in calling for concerned intellectuals to prepare to become the "thousand points of light" we will need to continue to illuminate the darkness and ensure the survival of the mass of accumulated human knowledge in the coming age of ignorance and barbarism, Mr. Berman ignores the existence of such a movement among the so-called neo-Luddites, or that such intellectual movements have a noted history in American culture, all the way from Thoreau's 19th century musings about self-reliance to Helen and Scott Nearing's retreat in the midst of the Depression to the woods of New England to live in self-imposed exiles as the first in a wave of subsistence farmers minimizing their dependence on a culture lurching wildly out of control.

Likewise, he never mentions contemporary authors like Sales Kirkpatrick, Theodore Roszak, Wendell Beery, or a number of others who have consistently warned of the dangerous instability and structured inequalities associated with global capitalism and the likelihood of its systematic collapse. Instead, Mr Berman prefers to give us a grand and entertaining education regarding what the previous Dark Age was like, what impelled Rome onto the slippery slope of cultural decline, and what the various monks and monastic orders in medieval Europe did to preserve the sum of existing knowledge. Similarly, while he correctly suggests Max Weber predicted the rise of a society based on increasing levels of bureaucratization and more and more complex hierarchies, he neglects to mention that Weber also warned that an integral aspect of this rationalization process would be to do foster the emergence of a class of specialized bureaucrats who would become "specialists without heart", monsters of effectiveness and efficiency increasingly lacking in any human vision or concern.

In fact, Herr Weber warned almost a hundred years ago of the potential threat the rise of an exclusively scientifically and technologically oriented culture posed for social democracies, with their tendency to trash traditional values and human orientation in favor of a faux rationality oriented almost exclusively on questions of effectiveness and efficiency. In such technically oriented calculations, human concerns take a back seat to accomplishing organizational goals. Sound familiar? We find no such discussion here, given Berman's concentration on a romantic fugue suggesting his thoughts regarding the particular shapes and modalities of the coming monastic intellectual orders, at one point actually suggesting the possibility of the same sorts of science fiction-based example as depicted in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" for consideration.

While all of this is great fun, and shows Mr Berman's keen intelligence, scholarship, and sense of imaginative conjecture, it has little to do with either the nature of our current dilemma or what we might practically do to either avert it or moderate its effects. Unless you want some interesting intellectual diversions in what seems more like science fiction than serious social commentary, I suggest you pass this by in favor of Neil Postman's "Technopoly" or Scott Nearing's "Living The Good Life". The single best strategy for dealing with whatever horrors as may face us is to live a life of meaning and purpose, and to do so as far removed from dependency on the current regime as possible. Unless Mr Berman can provide some more practical advice regarding how one survives to eventually live out his fantasies, planning to become a new monk in the forthcoming monastic orders that he predicts is really just an amusing exercise in mental masturbation.

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Summary: Painful, but too true.
Review: I don't want to duplicate what has already been said below, but I think it's important to point out one particularly valid idea in Dr. Berman's book: He debunks the commonly held myth that economic prosperity and intellectual excellence are corollated. So often we hear how American economic prosperity is evidence of our superior intellectual achievement. In fact, according to Dr. Berman, economic prosperity (a myth in itself) is a function of a techno-corporate conformity and mindless consumerism that together stifle the natural intellectual curiosity so important to a healthy and balanced human condition.

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Summary: Good but with a problems
Review: I found the book overall pretty good, but somewhat light as to content. There should have been more information offered for the price. What I did find interesting though was that the author rails against corporate america and publishing conglomerates, yet his own book is published by one of them. Moreover,the author says that because readers are into new age and don't like to think for themselves publishers like to print new age books that are distantly removed from common sense and critical thought. The reason for this is that those types of books sell well. Well, if this is indeed the case, why was his book published? The problem in the book is that the good professor falls victim to the harsh generalization fallacy. He gives examples and then paints with too broad of a brush. This is a common mistake form people who think they know it all, but if they did they should have known better in the first place!

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Summary: Please grow up
Review: Before picking this book up know that Mister Berman is a self described Marxist idealist. Then I recommend that you pick up some history books and take a body count resulting from this immoral philosophy (you can start in the most obvious place -- Nazi Germany -- Hitler, and those of you that read know this, was a socialist).

Before allowing yourself to be taken by this angry text, know that your own unhappiness is due to your inactions, not of those who have more than you. It doesn't do you much good to hate the successful and call them names. You will still have nothing. Sorry.

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Summary: Finding American with Both Hands
Review: In "The Twilight of American Culture," Morris Berman tells his readers that America is like any other civilization and that it will decline. In fact, he writes, American civilization has been in a steady decline for some time now. So what do we do? "If the historical record is clear on this point, there is no way out. We might as well fiddle while New York and Los Angeles burn." But Berman has a better idea. He calls it the monastic option. Here, one gets the sense of a secret order of the enlightened whose members may know of each other, and even be friends but never gather as an order. There are no "membership cards and badges (whether real or metaphorical), avant-garde language and appropriate party line, organization and even visibility," writes Berman Instead, Berman envisions these "monks," men and women, going about their business of preserving bits and pieces of their culture, shunning any inclination or attempt to institutionalize their work, for to do so "would be the kiss of death." In our current situation which Berman highlights with terms like Starbuckized, Coca-colonization and Rambification, any endeavor toward the excellent is likely to be bought out and sold by entrepreneurs ready to market it. Once the excellent has been packaged for sale, it is doomed to join the rest of American culture mashed together in an indistinguishable mess of the good and bad, the excellent and execrable, the elite and the rabble. While this book is an important addition to any thinking person's library, it will have a particular appeal to educators who are well aware "that our entire consciousness, our intellectual-mental life, is being Starbuckized, condensed into a prefabricated designer look...." To know the truth of what Berman has to say and suggest, all educators have to do is remember they work with the understanding that students are their customers.