Berman assembles with uncommon clarity a vast amount of scholarship, data, and commentary in support of conclusions that most readers will resist.
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 an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Morris Berman is a cultural historian and the author of
The Twilight of American Culture. He has held a number of university appointments, most recently as Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
--This text refers to an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
From the Author
From author Morris Berman: When I published my previous book in 2000, I characterized the historical phase we were in as a "twilight" period, similar to Rome in the waning days of its late-empire phase. It seems to me that it is not entirely an exaggeration to suggest that since 2000 we have effectively transited from twilight to night, entered a new Dark Age. Thus there are a number of developments that can be characterized as frankly medieval: the triumph of religion over reason, and a progressive rollback of Enlightenment humanism; a massive breakdown of education and critical thinking (the statistics of which will probably strike the reader as surreal); the actual legalization of torture, and its widespread use by the American government; and the growing political and economic marginalization of the United States on the world stage. Equally sobering is that the vast majority of Americans are either ignorant of these developments or actually approve of them, bringing to mind the famous remark by Will Durant that "a great nation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." Certainly, as one British colleague wrote me, the United States will be part of the future, but (he added) most of the future will take place outside of the United States. There is abundant evidence to indicate that our historical moment is passing, and that the zeitgeist, as it were, is moving on.
--This text refers to an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
From the Inside Flap
A sobering work that reveals that America has entered an inescapable social, cultural, and economic Dark Age. Historians now recognize that the fall of Rome, and the subsequent onset of the Dark Ages in Europe, cannot be ascribed to any single cause. The truth is that Rome no longer knew how to live; its decline was the result of a general malaise and structural weakness that grew over time. In Dark Ages America, Morris Berman argues that much the same can be said of the United States today. As religion triumphs over reason and democracy turns into plutocracy, the nation has entered a phase in its historical development from which there is no return. A particular strength of this book lies in the connections Berman makes between the large-scale processes of national collapse, such as an overextended economy and a self-destructive foreign policy, and the obvious deterioration of our daily lives: the frenzied acceleration of work, the erosion of integrity and community, and the impoverishment of the mass media. As the corporate-consumerist juggernaut that now defines the nation rolls on, removing meaning from our lives and leaving no real alternatives in its wake, the very factors that once propelled America to greatness--extreme individualism, territorial and economic expansion, and the pursuit of material wealth--are now, paradoxically, the nails in our collective coffin. Like the citizens of ancient Rome, we too no longer know how to live; and within a few decades the United States will be marginalized on the world stage, its hegemony replaced by China or the European Union.
Our options at this point, Berman suggests, are two: to continue pursuing policies that are short-sighted and destructive, thereby guaranteeing a fairly rapid decline; or to attempt some slight modifications of these policies, thereby rendering that decline a bit more gradual. What is not an option is reversing this trajectory, for the levers of social and political change have effectively vanished from the scene. There is, in short, no rabbit to be pulled out of a hat here; our eclipse is a fait accompli.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
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 TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
![Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire by [Morris Berman]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41K9ed8TIJL._SY346_.jpg)
