The Twilight of American Culture

by Morris Berman

The notion that American culture may be in a state of decline (assuming that it exists at all!) is probably not a surprise to people in most other parts of the world, but it's a sobering message for those of us who live in the Land of Dubya. Berman argues that the decline is obvious to anyone who bothers to take a look: "... It doesn't take an Emerson or an Einstein to recognize that the system has lost its moorings, and, like ancient Rome, is drifting into an increasingly dysfunctional situation."

Berman suggests that four factors are present when a civilization collapses (which you can also find discussed in far greater detail in Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies):

• Accelerating social and economic inequality
• Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems
• Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness
• Spiritual death — that is, Spengler's classicism: the empying out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it in formulas — kitsch, in short.

He elaborates on these points throughout the book, with a particularly depressing review of the declining level of literacy and general intelligence in the U.S. Did you know, for example, that according to a 1998 survey by the National Constitution Center, only 41 percent of American teenagers can name the three branches of government, but 59 percent can name the Three Stooges? I wasn't terribly surprised to learn that 42 percent of American adults (not students, but adults!) could not locate Japan on a world map, but I was stunned to learn that 15 percent could not even locate the United States! Perhaps we should give the country back to the Native Americans, and the rest of us should all go back to wherever we came from.

Perhaps most sobering is Berman's "good-news/bad-news" conclusion about all of this: the good news is that the ongoing decline of American culture probably won't culminate in a universally-recognized collapse for several more decades, or perhaps even a century or two — just as the citizens of Rome probably had a sense that things weren't going very well, circa 80 BC, but nevertheless continued to entertain themselves with chariot races and gladiator contests for another couple of centuries before the barbarians finally sacked the city. The bad news, unfortunately, can also be illustrated with the analogy of Rome: whenever the collapse does occur, it will probably last for centuries before a new Renaissance begins. Berman struggles with yet another analogy: perhaps we will need the cultural equivalent of the medieval monks to preserve the remnants of the old culture during the long Dark Ages that follow the collapse. For those of us who are also science fiction fans, it conjures up images of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

All in all, The Twilight of American Culture is a fairly depressing book; but if you're packing some books to take with you on vacation during the last couple weeks of August, I recommend it as a good contrast to the Dilbert cartoon books and that 94-page opus, Who Moved My Cheese?