Book
The twilight of American culture Morris Berman
Record details
- ISBN: 0393048799
-
Physical Description:
print
xiv, 205 p. ; 23 cm. - Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : Norton, c2000.
Content descriptions
| Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-193) and index. |
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Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at Selkirk College.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
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| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Circulation Modifier | Holdable? | Status | Due Date | Courses |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Castlegar Campus Library | E 169.12 B394 2000 (Text)
Copy: c. 1
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B001046929 | General | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Book News : Book News Reviews
Berman, an innovative cultural historian and social critic, offers an engaging account of our cultural decline. He reminds us of the persistence of the gap between rich and poor, the decline of functional literacy, and the antipathy our culture has toward anything intellectual. He explains how Enlightenment success devolved from free rational inquiry to laissez-faire commercialism to consumer emptiness, and argues for the refusal to base our lives on profit. The author has held visiting professorships in the US and Europe. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) - Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 June 2000
Cultural historian Berman grounds his critique of corporate capitalism on common characteristics of decadent civilizations, for example, "accelerating social and economic inequality" and "rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness." Berman offers examples of those characteristics and proposes a "monastic option" to "resist the spin and hype of the global corporate world order." Berman doesn't discourage active resistance (such as the recent demonstrations at meetings of the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund), but he doubts that such action (or the "change your head" panaceas of "New Age dreams or populist fantasies") will produce rapid improvement. What he urges instead is a more patient preservation of the best of the past, holding onto Enlightenment ideals for use several decades hence, when the corporate juggernaut has run its course. Provocative reading even for those whose view of globalization is less apocalyptic than Berman's ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 2000)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - Choice Reviews : Choice Reviews 2000 November
To his books on cultural renewal--from Reenchantment of the World (CH, May'82) to Wandering God (2000)--Berman now adds this primer for a "new Enlightenment." America in its "twilight phase," like Greco-Roman civilization in Late Rome, cries out for a "new monasticism" as "Dark Age" night descends. The late hour shows, as with Rome, in growing inequality and declining effectiveness, in dumbing-down of minds and cheapening of spirits ("kitsch" and "deconstruction"). Caught between corporate scientism ("McWorld") and New Age mysticism ("Oprah and Chopra"), devotees of the Enlightenment's body-mind-spirit sanity must create "zones of intelligence" through "spiritual nomadism." But cultural neo-nomads can only prepare--without certainty or dogma--for the "dawn" of the hoped-for new Enlightenment. Berman draws eruditely on the Greek and Latin classics, on sci-fi, on pop culture, on Stuart Hampshire and Immanuel Wallerstein and Warren Wagar. But what of his historical analogy? He rejects Charles Homer Haskins's respected Arab stimulus thesis for the West's modern rebirth in favor of an internal monks-into-heretics thesis when the former would seem a better analogy for today's multicultural world-exchanges. And his praise for the Hellenistic Age would seem to argue for reformism rather than lone-wolf escapism--unless he assumes America is too far gone. Readable at any level. Copyright 2000 American Library Association - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2000 May #1
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 Cahners Business Information.
