Morris Berman

This book did not have the depth of Berman's earlier works, but then it has more urgency. I am writing this review in 2023, decades after the book was published. The trends Berman outlines have surely continued. Probably when the book was published, most people found implausible the idea that the USA might not be eternal. But nowadays we have people in Congress calling for a national divorce and it looks less plausible that the USA can survive another few election cycles.

One curious feature of Berman's argument for the decline of the USA is that it doesn't include problems with resources or ecology. Berman is a cultural historian, so it makes sense that his argument is purely cultural. But still, surely a cultural historian can look at how culture is embedded in a physical-ecological context? Well, maybe that is another sign of the book's age: such connections might have been rarely drawn 25 years ago.

A major theme of the book is the proposal that an appropriate response to our process of cultural decline is to work to cultivate and preserve the most valuable nuggets of our culture, just at a small scale. Berman is quite insistent that the primary nuggets are associated with the European Enlightenment, Voltaire etc. The notion of preserving nuggets is modeled on the dark age monasteries of Ireland etc. that kept at least a few classical texts available. But the Renaissance did not rely mere on these copies. Islamic culture kept alive a lot of classical culture, and the Renaissance recovered much of this from Islamic sources. How did Marco Polo and other contacts with China contribute to the vitality of the Renaissance, I sure don't know. Well even Christopher Columbus and the opening of the Americas... rather late in the Renaissance, OK. But surely the road from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment was not built with purely European resources.

Berman sneers here at any kind of post-colonial perspective. If it's not European, it must be some primitive tribal nonsense. And of course a lot of New Age drivel does dress up nonsense in exotic costume. Maybe Berman is just of an old enough generation to make it difficult to see that high culture has existed outside of Europe, too... just as primitive nonsense exists in Europe, too!

My own hobby horse is the development of a Buddhist philosophy of science. Berman mostly dismisses deconstruction, but then he backs off a bit and limits his dismissal to the nihilist fringe. The kind of epistemological middle ground that Berman is looking for is what Buddhist thinkers have explored for thousands of years.

Despite these quibbles, Berman's perspectives on our cultural decline are still valuable and even fresh.… (más)

Berman focuses on the shift from Paleolithic Hunter-Gatherer society to Neolithic agricultural society. The Paleolithic mind had a horizontal outlook, attentive to appearances. The Neolithic outlook shifted to remote speculations. This shift involved many components - immediate return versus delayed return economies, for example. Delayed return comes with storage of food.

We are all Zoroastrian, that'd be another message here. Zoroastrians started the historical speculation of some future resolution of our present conficts.

Berman resists the temptation to prescribe a return to Hunter-Gatherer society as a panacea for our modern ills. He presents a nice outline of the Dominant Tradition, something like Plato's vision, with three Counter-Traditions, successively more radical.

He acknowledges that Zen Buddhism is a reasonable approximation of the most radical Counter-Tradition, but doesn't enter into any careful examination of e.g. Chinese or Japanese society and how Zen functions as a tradition in those. He does discuss the Mondragon collectives in Spain, but not in very great depth.

This book is a rich examination of the roots of our present crises, ecological, social, etc. It's not very optimistic... the structures that have brought us here are very deeply rooted. But still, by understanding how we got here, maybe that can reveal a crack in the wall....… (más)

Found this gem while searching for Morris Dancing... it has sat unopened on my shelves for some 20 years, but it looked interesting. And boy, was it ever interesting.
At times he seems like an unrepentant socialist rabble-rouser, at other times like a tenured don in a conservative English department with a Robert Browning fixation. He quotes the Cato Institute and the Brookings Institution in support of some of his numbers.
Seeing that this was published in the late 90's, I expected it to be dated. Uh, not so much. More like prescient, and his trends have obviously continued, He doesn't name Trump but he predicted him by his universal fighting fetish and his "I love the poorly educated!" schtick.
His proposed solutions were a bit thin. Interesting, but could use some more meat. The bottom line is that here is a man who is convinced that liberal arts, classics, rhetoric, dialectic, philosophy, etc., are the real products of civilization and ours are worth saving.
You many not agree with all he has to say, but in the end he'll make you think about big issues in a new way. And that's the very essence of the Enlightenment he so desperately wants to save.… (más)