How America is Failing

Being an optimist, I would choose a slightly different title for Morris Berman's book Why American Failed: The roots of imperial decline, although this would undoubtedly be over his strenuous objections. The book presents two essential visions for society: one driven by doing what is right versus one focused solely on self-interest and argues that America turned away from the former. A bitter paean to any grander vision for America, Berman denies any hope that the country might choose a different path. It's all over but the shouting.

He begins with the transition from colonialism to early capitalism: when people moved from building functional communities to industrialization and acquisitiveness. He argues that Jimmy Carter represented the last time a president really tried to shift the country from one path to the other, and then recounts the disastrous results of Reaganism and the steps that led to the collapse of 2008 and the subsequent failure to effect meaningful change.

Berman weaves a narrative drawing upon Vance Packard, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, and others, to draw a picture of modern life as meaningless and empty as it is cluttered with junk. He sees Americanism primarily as a hoax, a scam, with everyone hustling to find an angle where they can extract wealth for themselves out of the system.

Technology has failed us, he argues, replacing genuine human relationships with shallow and relatively worthless electronic contacts. Furthermore, as human life is increasingly organized around the needs of the technology, it increasingly fails to deliver what people actually need.

Berman sees the pursuit of this civilization as Ahab in Moby Dick, leading to the destruction of everything. It's hopeless. Americans are losers. Just give up:

[...] most of American society is wallowing in trash; it has no interest in questions of this sort, doesn't even know they exist. The culmination of a hustling, laissez-faire capitalist culture is that everything gets dumbed down; that all significant questions are ignored, and that every human activity is turned into a commodity, and anything goes if it sells.

Personally, he's decided to abandon the United States (if not America), but takes a few minutes to give us an eschatological preview of what we can expect as America collapses. He holds out some home for a "monastic option": voluntary simplicity and reorganizing at a local level, but sees it as just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

I don't disagree with most of his fundamental conclusions, but think that much more modest adjustments can be made to our society that could make it a lot better. And that his extremely negative take on current cultural products is belied by his use of them in a half-dozen instances to capture or describe particular insights.

He finishes by saying "collapse could be a good thing, if not exactly fun to live through. The entire premise of America was a mistake from the beginning." This reminds me again of the false dichotomy of leavers and takers. It's not yet clear whether the enterprise of human civilization was entirely folly, but I would still submit that the overall path was the right one, because the alternative absolutely invites extinction anyway. Only a taker society could possibly be in a position to protect the Earth from the next catastrophic meteor impact, which we can be reasonably sure would otherwise extinguish human life. Civilization may yet fail, but let's try some adjustments first, rather than just chucking the whole thing.