The Twilight of American Culture [Paperback]

Morris Berman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 039332169X | ISBN-13: 978-0393321692 | Publication Date: June 2001

An emerging cult classic about America's cultural meltdown—and a surprising solution.

A prophetic examination of Western decline, The Twilight of American Culture provides one of the most caustic and surprising portraits of American society to date. Whether examining the corruption at the heart of modern politics, the "Rambification" of popular entertainment, or the collapse of our school systems, Morris Berman suspects that there is little we can do as a society to arrest the onset of corporate Mass Mind culture. Citing writers as diverse as de Toqueville and DeLillo, he cogently argues that cultural preservation is a matter of individual conscience, and discusses how classical learning might triumph over political correctness with the rise of a "a new monastic individual"—a person who, much like the medieval monk, is willing to retreat from conventional society in order to preserve its literary and historical treasures. "Brilliantly observant, deeply thoughtful ....lucidly argued."—Christian Science Monitor

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"If you have finally had it with CNN and Hollywood and John Grisham and New Age 'spirituality,' then pull up a chair, unplug your phone (beeper, TV, fax machine, computer, etc.), and give me a few hours of your time. I promise to do my best not to entertain you."

A slightly forbidding introduction to a book, but indicative of its author's disgust at the homogenized McWorld in which we live, and an enticing challenge to read on. As the title The Twilight of American Culture suggests, Morris Berman's outlook is somewhat bleak. Analogizing the contemporary United States to the late Roman Empire, Berman sees a nation fat on useless consumption, saturated with corporate ideology, and politically, psychically, and culturally dulled. But he believes that this behemoth--what Thomas Frank called the "multinational entertainment oligopoly"--must buckle under its own weight. His hope for a brighter tomorrow lies in a modern monastic movement, in which keepers of the enlightenment flame resist the constant barrage of "spin and hype." Ironically, despite his disdain for "the fashionable patois of postmodernism," he approvingly quotes poststructuralist theorist Jean-François Lyotard's maxim "elitism for everybody" in describing this cadre of idiosyncratic, literate devotees, these new monks.

Berman is plainspoken and occasionally caustic. The Twilight of American Culture is an informed and thought-provoking book, a wake-up call to a nation whose powerful minority has become increasingly self-satisfied as their stock options ripen, while an underclass that vastly outnumbers the e-generation withers on the vine and cannot locate itself on any map. It is a quick and savage read that aims to get your eyes off this computer, your nose out of that self-help book, and send you back to thought and action. --J.R. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

American culture is in crisis, argues Berman, pointing out that "millions of high school graduates can barely read or write"; "common words are misspelled on public signs"; "most Americans grow old in isolation, zoning out in front of TV screens"; and "40% of American adults [do] not know that Germany was our enemy in World War II"--never mind that most students don't even want to learn Greek or Latin. Berman's lament that "like ancient Rome [American culture] is drifting into an increasingly dysfunctional situation" at first makes his book seem like a neoconservative treatise along the lines of the late Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. But Berman, who teaches in the liberal arts masters program at Johns Hopkins University, doesn't locate the cause of this malaise in multiculturalism or postmodernism, as Bloom did (although he is no fan of either one), but rather in the increasing dominance of corporate culture and the global economy, which he claims creates a homogenous business and consumer culture that disdains art, beauty, literature, critical thinking and the principles of the Enlightenment. Berman's provocative remedy is to urge individuals who are appalled by this "McWorld" to become "sacred/secular humanist" monks who renounce commercial slogans and the "fashionable patois of postmodernism" and pursue Enlightenment values. While Berman's eclectic approach often makes for engaging reading, his quirky and almost completely theoretical solutions are unlikely to galvanize many readers. Agent, Candice Fuhrman. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039332169X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393321692
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (97 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #44 in Books > History > Ancient > Early Civilization

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Way To Think About Some Very Old Problems, June 17, 2000

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Charles D. Hayes (Wasilla, AK USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Twilight of American Culture (Hardcover)

If I were to write a short list of contemporary authors who have most affected my thinking during the past two decades, Morris Berman would be at the top. His books "Coming to Our Senses" and "The Reenchantment of the World" not only gave me new insights into the notion of a more embodied existence, they also gave me a lasting epistemological appreciation of the kind of rigor necessary to bring light to any subject that one truly wants to learn more about. My views about the possibilities the future holds for humankind run hot and cold. I'm optimistic one day and pessimistic the next. But I've long held the position that while the mass of American culture seems to be, as Neil Postman observed, "drowning in a sea of amusements," individuals still have an opportunity to live as meaningful a life as is possible to live. Now Berman comes along with "The Twilight of American Culture," which captures this reality not only in a theoretical sense but also in a very practical way. Berman advocates creating "zones of intelligence" both public and private and says, "This is not about `fifty ways to save the earth,' `voluntary simplicity,' or some program of trendy ascetic activities. Nor does it involve anything showy and dramatic, and virtually anyone reading this book is capable of making an effort in this direction." "The Twilight of America Culture" is a rear-guard action for finding an oasis of meaning in an insane world. Highly recommended.

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finding American with Both Hands, August 9, 2000

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charles boltz (Hailey, ID) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Twilight of American Culture (Hardcover)

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.

123 of 140 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provocative But Flawed Discussion Of Contemporary Culture!, September 4, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Twilight of American Culture (Hardcover)

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.