Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire [Paperback]

Morris Berman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2007

"Provocative...stimulating and insightful."—Publishers Weekly

In Dark Ages America, the pundit Morris Berman argues that the nation has entered a dangerous phase in its historical development from which there is no return. As the corporate-consumerist juggernaut that now defines the nation rolls on, the very factors that once propelled America to greatness—extreme individualism, territorial and economic expansion, and the pursuit of material wealth—are, paradoxically, the nails in our collective coffin. Within a few decades, Berman argues, the United States will be marginalized on the world stage, its hegemony replaced by China or the European Union. With the United States just one terrorist attack away from a police state, Berman's book is a controversial and illuminating look at our current society and its ills.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this provocative, scattershot jeremiad, cultural historian Berman (The Twilight of American Culture) likens America to ancient Rome on the brink. On the geopolitical plane, he contends, the United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy, vulnerable to terrorist blowback and, worse, collapse if foreign creditors finally pull the plug. The rot is cultural and spiritual, too: Americans are cold, alienated shopaholics immured in suburban anomie, each encased in a private bubble of iTunes and media noise and indifferent to the public good. Culprits include globalization, technology and, more fundamentally, the individualism and commercialism that is the bedrock of American identity. Because American civilization is a "package deal," the author considers it impervious to piecemeal reform and, given Americans' ingrained "stupidity" and willful blindness, unsalvageable. Berman's attempts to tie every American dysfunction to an all-encompassing sickness of soul overreaches, leading him to lump together serious issues like poverty and the Abu Ghraib outrages with trivialities like annoying cell phone yakkers or the "freedom fries" phenomenon, which he bemoans as "symbolic of an emptiness at the core." Often stimulating and insightful in its particulars, his indictment, like the jingoism it abhors, is too sweeping and essentialist to fully capture American reality. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

A despairing analyst of contemporary America, Berman continues criticism begun in The Twilight of American Culture (2000). One character crystallizing Berman's thoughts is President George W. Bush, under whom, according to Berman, the U.S. is incipiently, if not actually, suffering a "presidential dictatorship," a "de facto Christian theocratic plutocracy." In that vein, Berman undertakes a wide-ranging condemnation of American economic and foreign policy of the past 50 years, which he believes has propelled America into disastrous decline. That Berman inveighs against free markets and thinks the cold war was partly a dynamic of the Soviet Union acting defensively infuses this work with a solidly leftist viewpoint. In Berman's vigorous arrangement of evidence, current events are propelling us upon an irreversibly downward trajectory toward a societal situation resembling the Dark Ages. However, Berman offers no positive ideas to reverse this perceived free fall, making his tome more of an alarm than a solution. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393329771
• ISBN-13: 978-0393329773
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #118,009 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

138 of 147 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark Destiny, April 27, 2006

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (Hardcover)

A work of breathtaking erudition and synthesis, DARK AGES AMERICA offers no hope for arresting America's career as a self-destructive global hegemon. While that's a difficult conclusion to swallow, Berman amply defends his thesis, drawing his supporting evidence from a variety of disciplines: history, cultural studies, polling data, economic analysis, sociology and social psychology. The possibility of America's turning away from its dark destiny, which in Mr. Berman's analysis is now clearly manifest, is made to seem remote, and, regrettably, convincingly so.

Particularly compelling is Mr. Berman's discussion of America's need for an enemy, an Other upon which to focus in order that we never turn our attention to the emptiness at the center of the American psyche: The Red Menace, the Cold War, the War on Drugs, The War on Terror. Each of these wars has served to diminish and even outlaw critical thinking about America's empiric career. In a constant state of emergency, history for Americans is a set of bullet points which are cynically served up as justification for the latest military adventure. Berman's anecdotes and survey findings paint an American populace that is self-absorbed, provincial, and willfully anti-intellectual, a people for whom bullet points more than suffice.

We watch television shows about tightly knit families and groups of friends, staving off the loneliness generated by the individualistic, devil-take-the-hindmost ethos that is America's real civil religion, Berman says. We turn away from the terror that we inflict on innocent people in order that we may claim their oil wealth and so keep this dwindling life-blood flowing in the veins of the American project of global empire. We pay no attention to the vast sums of money spent to prop up the energy-military-industrial complex. Instead we are distracted by cynical stories of welfare queens, wicked tax and spend liberals, evil dictators and axes of evil, our resentments kept well-stoked and smoldering.

On a personal note, landing at Kansas City International Airport the other day, my vision of America altered by my in-flight reading of Mr. Berman's remarkable work, I saw the landscape through new eyes, a landscape I now understood to have been systematically vandalized by the corporatocracy: big box stores, chain hotels and restaurants, strip malls and gas stations, a landscape everywhere repeated across the United States, a landscape we intend to impose upon the world in order to fulfill our destiny as bringer of freedom as expressed through consumption.

While this cookie-cutter landscape had always before aroused in me a sense of unease, an unease that had become in me clich? and so easily subdued, with the assistance of Berman's perspicacious vision, I became alive to the fact that this American landscape represents in physical form the ingenuity and monomania of America's new empiric form.

Empty of community, driven by the ethos of radical individualism, I saw an interlocking system of endless consumption in which we are all driven by the relentless stoking of our vanity and desire by clever marketers who have taught us to confuse social goods with economic goods, and by a political structure which mystifies cause and effect, which ruthlessly condemns anyone who has the temerity to question the course of this bleak, empty empire.

140 of 154 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the sad truth, April 9, 2006

By 

Fred Strohm (Pacifica, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (Hardcover)

Americans, perhaps even more than the citizens of other nations, are fond of repeating that their country is the greatest nation on Earth. They are not the ideal customers for the news that their nation is in the Dark Ages.

And given their boundless enthusiasm for hi tech, they are likely to find the notion absurd. How can we possibly be in the Dark Ages, when our copying machines would have seemed supernatural to medieval monks?

But the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave are not any more real when displayed on a 62-inch flat screen TV.

Whatever crimes this book may be charged with, its worst offense is stating the plain truth.

Of course everyone will complain about the shortage of recommended cures.

But if a doctor isn't sure how to save a patient with a dozen fatal diseases, the patient's chance of survival is better if she at least knows what ails her.

152 of 169 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unpalatable Argument, But Difficult to Refute, March 29, 2006

By 

Al Max "Al Max" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (Hardcover)

As a true-blue American, my blood rings with the "Gee Whiz, we can lick this" attitude that is in so many of our DNA, and that traces back to Howdy-Doodee, Will Rogers, Horatio Alger, and so many real and not so real characters. The idea that some problems, and some bad state of affairs, are simply not solveable is difficult to swallow. It seems well, unamerican. So it's ironic that Morris Berman's argument that America itself is heading downhill, and is, in a sense, unsolveable is so well made. He makes a strong case that we are on the downhill slope of empire, trapped in our own hubris, with too many systemic flaws built into the operating system. His work is comparable, I suspect, to Kevin Phillips' new book, American Theocracy, which, according to reviews, also paints a dark picture of our future. Whatever side you take on this country's future, Morris Berman's latest book is well worth reading.