Berman, Morris

Berman, Morris. The Twilight of American Culture. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

If we can pull together the treads of this discussion so far, it would seem that four factors are present when a civilization collapses:

(a) Accelerating social and economic inequality

(b) Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems

(d) Spiritual death – that is, Spengler’s classicism: the empting out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it in formulas – kitcsch, in short. (p. 19)

Why is this slide toward greater inequality occurring? Partly, it is because the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is itself part of the process of declining marginal returns. Every time a greater investment in complexity takes place, it is accompanied by a greater share of the pie for the elite. Hierarchy generates power; the greater the verticality, the greater the opportunity for the few to exploit the many, especially in times of debt and crisis. (p. 28)

Of the 158 countries in the United Nations, the United States ranks forty-ninth in literacy. Roughly 60 percent of the adult population has never read a book of any kind, and only 6 percent reads as much as one book a year, where book is defined to include Harlequin romances and self-help manuals. Something like 120 million adults are illiterate or read at no better than a fifth-grade level. Among readers age twenty-one to thirty-five, 67 percent regularly read a daily newspaper in 1965, as compared with 31 percent in 1998. (p. 36)

If the redistribution of wealth outlined earlier reflects a “seismic shift” in American society, a similar kind of shift can be seen in the tenor of American attitudes and intellectual abilities (nor are the two trends unrelated).

the inequality of wealth and declining marginal returns on investment in complexity create a situation in which the educational system and intellectual production are negatively affected on a number of levels. (p. 43)

At the most immediate level, of course, is the disintegration of the public school system, and the loss of its economic base. (p. 43)

Even beyond this postmodern claptrap , the college/university situation in the United States has finally wound up in the position of the Church in the late Middle Ages, which sold people indulgences (read diplomas) so that they could get into heaven (read a well-paying job). (p. 43)

As many faculty members have discovered, you can provoke real hostility from students merely by presenting required course material, and many students assume (usually, quite rightly) that administrators – whoa re the actual intended audience for course evaluations – will punish professors who expect too much of them. (p. 44)

This has become the rule at thousands of institutions of higher education, where a grade of B is now considered average (or slightly below), and where A’s are given out almost automatically so as not to threaten student enrollments, on which institutional funds depend. (p. 44)

Commodification of knowledge necessarily means a loss of nuance, and we see this everywhere. (p. 46)

Corporate takeover of intellectual property has become quite dramatic, and it has resulted in the replacement of intelligent citizens by mindless consumers, and a corresponding conceptual flattening of public discourse. (p. 47)

Campus bookstores have become largely toy stores, selling only course texts, mugs, and stuffed animals. (p. 48)

Deans and college presidents model themselves on corporate CEOs, and they use the language, the odd doublespeak, of corporate management. (p. 48)

The rise of the new microchip technology, a major player in the new economic order, also contributes heavily to the dumbing down of America and the commodification of knowledge.

Finally, we come to the phenomenon of postmodernism and deconstruction, a philosophical viewpoint that seems to have taken over much of the academy, and which has become part of the air we breathe: the notion that nothing is absolute, that one value is as good as another, that there is no difference between knowledge and opinion, and that any text or set of ideas is merely a mask for someone’s political agenda. This lends itself well to the new world of microchip technology, inasmuch as it promotes a valueless universe…A philosophy of despair masquerading as radical intellectual chic, postmodernism is, in fact, the ideological counterpart to the civilizational collapse that is going on around us; or, as cultural critic Fredric Jameson has written, the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” in which the entire world is turned into a shopping mall. (p. 50)

One effect of this commercial domination of our lives is the pervasiveness of kitsch, or hype, as part of our collective spiritual death. (p. 53)

This phenomenon of the “skin” of mass consumerism shows up everywhere, for we have become a nation unable to think except by means of slogans. (p. 54)

One further aspect of our current spiritual collapse is our increasing inability to relate to one another with a minimum of courtesy or even awareness. (p. 57)

Yet another distinctive aspect of the process of spiritual death in the late twentieth century has been the collapse of the Freudian superego, that part of the mind that seeks to maintain adult behavior, social norms and standards. (p. 58)

The merger of adolescent attitudes and corporate values can also be seen in our most prominent art form – namely, film…More and more, films are spectacular, violent, and impersonal, filled with “a rush of frenetic images.” The context is one of corporate cynicism, in which manufactured raves are supplied to the critics in advance by the publicity people. (p. 60)

In the case of the twilight phase of Rome, there was a monastic “class” – a tiny handful of individuals – who saw that they could not reverse these trends but that they could do their best to preserve the treasures of their civilization, the ways of thinking and living that might be appreciated in another, healthier era. (p. 69)

The way of life suggested by the monastic option may attract only a minute percentage of the American population, but I believe that the potential for cultural renewal, for a dawn that this may ultimately engender, is real, and that the rewards of a life lived in terms of quality, as opposed to kitsch, are enormous. (pp. 69-70)