America the Beautiful?

Week of Monday, January 14, 2002

If Morris Berman and Robert Kaplan are correct, the United States is well on its way to Third World status. Here are two books I just read and recommend to you.

The Twilight of American Culture (2000), writes Morris Berman, is “a book for oddballs, for men and women who experience themselves as expatriates within their own country.” The book has been a bestseller and received notable commendations from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Berman argues that our culture exhibits symptoms of deep distress, and only time will tell whether it will collapse or merely undergo radical transformation.

In the front of the book he quotes Neil Postman's work Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), and since that is one of my all-time favorite books, I'll use it as a convenient summary of Berman's thesis:

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

In Berman's view, our society's sickness reveals itself in four disturbing symptoms.

1. Rapidly increasing socioeconomic inequality, due to the inordinate redistribution of income to the rich, the shrinking middle class, the growing hegemony of multinational corporations, the steep rise of the number of children living below the poverty line, and the like.
2. The growth of government bureaucracy and, simultaneously, its increasing dysfunction and inability to solve social problems.
3. Plummeting levels of literacy and intellectual awareness, crumbling public schools, and epidemic levels of crime and drug abuse, a picture Berman describes as “unambiguously bleak.” Think for a moment that of the 158 nations in the United Nations, America ranks forty-ninth in literacy, or that our country incarcerates more people per capita than any country on earth.
4. The evisceration of cultural content by rampant consumerism and the resultant “spiritual death.” We observe this spiritual death in any number of ways, writes Berman, but one instance I found most interesting was his description of “the collapse of the Freudian superego, that part of the mind that seeks to maintain adult behavior, social norms and standards.”

During the decline of the Roman Empire, a small number of Christian monastics withdrew from culture, renounced cultural decay and preserved the treasures of civilization for a later day. Berman appeals to this historical precedent in his call for “a new monastic individual.” The new monastic individual will live “underground”, as it were, refusing to be co-opted by cultural trends, creating “zones of intelligence”, and living a “nomadic” sort of spiritual consciousness. All of this is done out of the public eye. The iconoclasm is lived quietly and without fanfare, for the new monastic individual would never participate in anything even close to an “ism.” I find Berman's idea here so compelling, and so commensurate with the themes of Christian salt, yeast and light, that I quote him at length:

Today's “monk” is determined to resist the spin and hype of the global corporate world order; he or she knows the difference between reality and theme parks, integrity and commercial promotion. He regards Starbucks as a sad plastic replica of the gritty (or bohemian) cafe of bygone days. She has no truck with the trendy “wisdom” of the New Age, and instead seeks guidance about the human condition from Flaubert or Virginia Woolf, rather than from the latest guru tossed up by the media or the counterculture. Computers and the Internet are, for such a person, useful tools, not a way of life, and she understands that both the Republican and Democratic parties represent corporate interests, rather than genuine democracy. She has no problem being labeled an elitist, because she agrees with Garrison Keillor that “what's really snooty is to put out commercial garbage for an audience you yourself feel superior to.” The new monk is a sacred/secular humanist, dedicated not to slogans or the fashionable patois of postmodernism, but to Enlightenment values that lie at the heart of our civilization: the disinterested pursuit of the truth, the cultivation of art, the commitment to critical thinking, inter alia. Above all, he knows the difference between quality and kitsch, and he seeks to preserve the former in the teeth of a culture that is drowning in the latter. If she is a high school teacher, she has her class reading the Odyssey, despite the fact that half the teachers in the school have assigned Danielle Steel. If he is a writer, he writes for posterity, not for the best-seller lists. As a mother, she takes her kids camping or to art museums, not to Pocohontas. He elects, in short, to save his life via the monastic option.¹

Robert Kaplan is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly whose eight books have been translated into a dozen languages and which, almost without exception, have garnered both critical praise and controversial reviews. He claims that his book An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future (1998) is not pessimistic, that it is a chronicle not so much of decline but of radical transformation. That is rather unconvincing given its title, not to mention its content. At the least, he believes that “the continued existence of the United States should never be taken for granted.”

What one sees, of course, depends upon where you stand, and in this and his other books Kaplan's genius is to combine historical, political, social, and cultural analysis with everyday, common experiences and conversations with people. Most of Kaplan's works fall into the genre of political travelogue and foreign affairs. In Balkan Ghosts (1993), for example, he traveled by rickety bus, taxis, and foot across what used to be Yugoslavia. The result was an uncannily prescient analysis of the disintegration of that country. Similarly, in The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (1996), Kaplan traveled from the horn of West Africa to Southeast Asia, experiencing and in turn explaining the ominous future these crumbling nation-states face due to their population explosion, environmental degradation, ethnic hatreds, and government corruption. Whether talking to a gun smuggler, a warlord, a border guard, or a government minister, Kaplan combines his experiences with prophetic passion and keen insights.

For Empire Wilderness Kaplan traveled across more than a dozen western states, from Forth Leavenworth, Kansas to East St. Louis, from Mexico back up to Vancouver. To take my favorite example, he recounts his impressions riding a Greyhound bus four hundred miles from Albuquerque east to Amarillo. Almost no one wears a watch, nobody is reading, the speech patterns of conversations are almost incomprehensible, most people are obese and oddly dressed, and black, plastic garbage bags double for suitcases. His point?

So far, Western democracy has existed within a rather thin band of social and economic conditions: high literacy, an established bourgeoisie, and a flexible hierarchy in which people move up and down an economic ladder, most of them bunched in the middle, instead of vast and rigidly separated classes. But what if such wide, rigid class distinctions reemerge—with a deepening chasm between an enlarged underclass and a globally oriented upper class—while the dialogue between ruler and ruled becomes increasingly ritualistic and superficial? Will the forms of democracy remain while its substance decays?²

Kaplan predicts that America is moving away from a country that is a monolithic nation-state governed by an effective central government in Washington. Rather, the forces of race, class, economic disparity, education and geography are fragmenting us into something more akin to suburban city-states, “pods” with no center but only cookie cutter strip malls. In explaining his book to a basket weaver in Oregon, Kaplan said his book explored whether fifty years from now Americans would feel moved when they heard the music of John Philip Sousa on Inauguration Day. “She said,” Kaplan writes, “that she can't imagine anyone feeling such an emotion even now.”

America is a beautiful country; that's why people from all over the world clamor to live here. But as a political experiment the jury is still out on our young country. When you compare our two brief centuries with the five millennia of, say, China or Egypt, then the trends identified by Berman and Kaplan give one pause for serious reflection. I think Kaplan is correct that, at a minimum, our country will undergo significant transformations in the coming decades and centuries.