Oprah, Chopra, and Massive Dystopia
Written: Nov 01 '02 (Updated Nov 02 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Intelligently written, thought-provoking.
Cons: Inexplicably silent on the topic of giant panties.
The Bottom Line: A little book that packs a wallop. There are a lot of Big Ideas here.
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| Lobstergirl's Full Review: Morris Berman - The Twilight of American Culture |
As may be inferred from its title, The Twilight of American Culture (Norton, 2000) is part of a publishing trend that has become somewhat long in the tooth: books that bemoan the dumbing down of America and its overall cultural decline. If you had to pick a point of origin for the modern expression of this genre, you might go with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which focused primarily on the state of higher education. [See the end of this review for more examples of the genre.] Twilight, by the academic Morris Berman, has a larger scope. Berman suggests that we are headed toward another Dark Age.
The notion of the decline and disappearance of civilizations seems quaint and archaic now: Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome – can anyone mention America in the same breath and be taken seriously? Surely there is a strength and permanence to American culture, despite its frequent fatuousness, especially given the Americanization of the rest of the world. In fact, Berman argues, this triumph of consumerism, corporate hegemony, hype, commodity fetishism and what we like to call global “democracy” is indistinguishable from the collapse and disintegration of American civilization. “For a zoned-out, stupefied populace, “democracy” will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy’s and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news.” What some consider the vitality or efflorescence of American culture “celebrates nothing substantive beyond buying and owning things.”
But isn’t there at least a free market of ideas? Well, no, not when most of the books in the English-speaking world are published by six multinational corporations that serve the lowest common consumer denominator in the quest for profits. In this kind of climate, censorship is not even necessary. Berman quotes from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where the job of the fireman who hunts down banned books in order to burn them is actually superfluous, because “the public itself stopped reading of its own accord.” Of course, Americans haven’t stopped reading; the problem is, most of us are reading Danielle Steele, McBusiness twaddle like Who Moved My Cheese?, New Age dreck such as The Celestine Prophecy, and Deepak Chopra’s hilariously titled Escaping the Prison of the Intellect, about which Berman says,
On one level, [Chopra] has a point, in that we can get caught up in cognitive categories, to the detriment of reality……..….The problem is that Chopra seems to be addressing an audience that for the most part hasn’t managed to find its way into the “prison of the intellect” in the first place. It is one thing to see the limits of the Enlightenment tradition after you have studied it for a few decades. It’s another to reject it before you have ever been exposed to it.
This book is far more than just an entertaining skewering of “Chopra & Oprah”, though. Berman is an excellent writer who makes very good use of primary and secondary sources. He integrates Joseph Tainter’s theory of declining marginal returns and Spengler’s concept of classicism with his own analysis of our current soul-deadening consumerist culture. He also invokes Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of Enlightenment and Max Weber’s notion of rationalization, interspersing them with Robert Kaplan’s ideas on America as corporate oligarchy “which offers entertainment in place of values” and Don DeLillo’s on the “purposelessness and paranoia” of commodity culture.
Berman takes a fascinating detour into monasticism (although it is more than a detour; it is central to his argument) to explain the vanishing and reappearance of intellectual life over the period of the Dark to the Middle Ages. The conventional thinking is that intellectual life and the classic texts were kept alive in monasteries during the Dark Ages, but Berman argues that this is not exactly correct. Monks copied the classical manuscripts by hand, and thus performed the valuable service of preserving them, but their work was rote, without any real examination, analysis or possibly even understanding of these texts. Essentially, intellectual life was dead. It was not until there was a reemergence of the idea of the self, and intentionality and an interior life, that intellectualism could resurface. The Middle Ages saw the creation of heretics, people for whom faith was more than just a matter of ritual and religious dogma but also intentionality and ethics. Romantic love emerged, and mirrors became popular again. Homicide “with malice aforethought” was singled out for special punishment. All these things depended on a new, or resurrected, notion of the self, on a spiritual or psychological paradigm shift. The resurrection of intellectual life in postmodern America, Berman argues, will similarly rely on a commitment to individualism, interiority, individual judgment and achievement, not the herd mentality that characterizes our culture now.
Books like this have to be careful not to fall too far into an ahistorical nostalgia for the Golden Eras of the past. Berman paraphrases John Simon (Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture) to the effect that we can no longer make mythological allusions, pepper our speech with foreign phrases, or refer to literary characters and expect to be understood by more than a tiny handful of people. As these authors must know (they are largely scholars, after all), there has probably never been a time in history when the educated elites could do these things and expect to be understood by the serfs, peasants, proletariat, or Kelly Ripa. One of the nice things about Berman’s analysis is that he sidesteps the nostalgia trap entirely; in order to be nostalgic, you almost have to have a linear and regressive view of history. Berman has a cyclical, or oscillatory, view of history (and of the future) that borrows heavily from Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of Enlightenment, in which each triumphant civilization contains the seeds of its own disintegration.
Books like his, Berman acknowledges, are often labeled “elitist”. Critics of elitism argue that “the commercialization of culture is a positive thing....……a democratization process that “lets everybody in.” His response is to be amazed that “Americans are quick to call intellectuals –- who have no power at all -– “elitist,” yet remain oblivious to the real oligarchic elites, which are corporate.”
What, then, is Berman’s goal? To quote from Jean-François Lyotard, “elitism for everybody.” In the meantime, certain individuals will choose the “monastic option”, a withdrawal from consumerist hype and the commodification of everything. These latter day monks will embody and preserve what is valuable in our cultural heritage, not by copying the Great Books onto CD’s but by undertaking quiet and peaceful guerilla actions against corporate oligarchies. Michael Moore is one of these monks; Noam Chomsky would be except that he is already too heroic and highly visible a figure. (I have to think Moore would no longer merit Berman’s stamp of monkhood today, given that at this very moment I am watching him converse with Oprah, a corporate oligarchy unto herself.) Where Berman gets a little wiggy is the final chapter, where he tries to see into the future, to imagine what kind of civilization will emerge a century or two hence when we crawl out of our monastic holes. He hopes it will be a New Enlightenment, in which true democracy and intellectual inquiry are prized by a majority of the population, and business and cybertechnology play ancillary roles. Good luck with that, people of the future.
I am largely sympathetic to the complaints of Berman and his ilk. I don’t disagree that America has undergone a sad and pathetic dumbing down, even as public and private education become more widely available to an increasing swath of society. Nor do I disagree that much of American culture is a stinking, garbage strewn morass, extruded from a small handful of unspeakably powerful corporations, a “caricature of culture”. Yet for me and many of my peers, reasonably well-educated and intelligent people, the response to some of this cultural garbage (kitsch) is as much ambivalence or enjoyment, as disgust. As I read this book, I watched The Bachelor, a thrilling and addictive psychodrama that nonetheless must rank as one of the lowest sociocultural episodes of the last two centuries, both in its cheesy scripting and its moral bankruptcy. The degree to which this show erases the feminist gains of the past 150 years is nauseating, and I don’t know quite how I’m going to keep myself entertained until next Wednesday at 8 p.m.
Suggested Reading List:
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Neil Postman)
Waiting for the Barbarians (Lewis Lapham)
Culture of Complaint (Robert Hughes)
Dumbing Down (Katharine Washburn and John Thornton, eds.)
BAD, or The Dumbing of America (Paul Fussell)
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Sven Birkerts)
In Plato’s Cave (Alvin Kernan)
I have read only one of these and can’t vouch for the others, which Berman refers to in this book.
Recommended:
Yes
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