The Twilight of American Culture - Hardcover

Berman, Morris

3.84

686 ratings by Goodreads

9780715630822: The Twilight of American Culture

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715630822 ISBN 13: 9780715630822

Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 2001

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Like ancient Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, the American Empire has now seen the passage of its most triumphant years and is rapidly approaching a period of increased social chaos. So argues Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture, one of the most caustic portraits of American society to date. Whether examining the corruption at the heart of modern politics, the "Rambification" of popular entertainment, or the collapse of our school systems, Berman's analysis makes clear that there is little we can do as a society to arrest the onset of corporate Mass Mind culture.Citing writers as diverse as de Toqueville and Don DeLillo, Berman argues that cultural preservation is a matter of individual conscience, a refusal to base one's life on kitsch or consumerism, profit or self-promotion. He discusses how classical learning might triumph over political correctness with the rise of a "a new monastic individual" -- a person who, much like the medieval monk, is willing to retreat from conventional society in order to preserve its literary and historical treasures. The Twilight of American Culture is a book no literate, thinking American can afford to be without.

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Review:

"If you have finally had it with CNN and Hollywood and John Grisham and New Age 'spirituality,' then pull up a chair, unplug your phone (beeper, TV, fax machine, computer, etc.), and give me a few hours of your time. I promise to do my best not to entertain you."

A slightly forbidding introduction to a book, but indicative of its author's disgust at the homogenized McWorld in which we live, and an enticing challenge to read on. As the title The Twilight of American Culture suggests, Morris Berman's outlook is somewhat bleak. Analogizing the contemporary United States to the late Roman Empire, Berman sees a nation fat on useless consumption, saturated with corporate ideology, and politically, psychically, and culturally dulled. But he believes that this behemoth--what Thomas Frank called the "multinational entertainment oligopoly"--must buckle under its own weight. His hope for a brighter tomorrow lies in a modern monastic movement, in which keepers of the enlightenment flame resist the constant barrage of "spin and hype." Ironically, despite his disdain for "the fashionable patois of postmodernism," he approvingly quotes poststructuralist theorist Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard's maxim "elitism for everybody" in describing this cadre of idiosyncratic, literate devotees, these new monks.

Berman is plainspoken and occasionally caustic. The Twilight of American Culture is an informed and thought-provoking book, a wake-up call to a nation whose powerful minority has become increasingly self-satisfied as their stock options ripen, while an underclass that vastly outnumbers the e-generation withers on the vine and cannot locate itself on any map. It is a quick and savage read that aims to get your eyes off this computer, your nose out of that self-help book, and send you back to thought and action. --J.R.

About the Author:

Morris Berman is a cultural historian and the author of The Twilight of American Culture. He has held a number of university appointments, most recently as Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

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