If you have a gnawing sense that things aren't what they should be, that the grand rhetoric of American exceptionalism is really little more than bad propaganda, you're not alone. But what do in the face of evident decline, as a superpower, as a culture, as a place of spiritual succor, as, frankly, a civilization? You can start by reading Morris Berman.
Berman writes with a bracing and realistic sobriety about what makes life living. He calls for a new monasticism, a renewal of individual commitments to excellence in word and deed that takes root outside the mainstream of a consumerist/corporate culture celebrating success as though conformity, the ethos of the group, were good. He's the sort of author who makes you feel good about the decision to tune out the white noise of the politics of right/left. The fact as both parties suck; neither has much to offer.
Berman is not calling for a retreat to cloisters. Rather, he urges a passionate engagement with good literature, good values, a way of life worth preserving for posterity, even if what the future holds, at least in the near term, is bleak. I found the message persuasive, and realized that for the past decade or so, my wife and I have been doing just that -- we've long since said farewell to the American creed. The best and brightest resort to irony as a way of coping with a moral and intellectual vacuum; the rest simply shop until they drop; the stupid, and there are plenty of them, chant patriotic gore while refusing to confront the reality that class divisions in the United States are sowing the seeds of eventual disruption, even violence. The center no longer fails to hold; it has become a vortex sucking the life out of those who care to look to mainstream for comfort.
Indeed, in the past year I've proudly hung an anarchist flag in my office. When clients ask how I, as a lawyer, can hang such a flag, I tell them the answer is simple: I do not believe that the rule of law reflects justice -- it simply reflects a more or less civilized way of responding to conflict. I am a good shepherd trying to keep my clients from harm in a dangerous world, and few things are as dangerous as a naive belief that our laws are anything more than bandaids slapped on a rotting corpse.
I only discovered Berman last week. I've spent my free time this week reading through his works. It's like discovering an old friend. No, make that like discovering that the silent voice muttering in the back of your mind that trouble is coming isn't so crazy after all. Read Berman. He's literate, non-polemical, and a steady guide through troubled times.
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