Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire by Morris Berman - Excerpts

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire. Morris Berman. 2006. ISBN 0-393-05866-2

EXCERPTS

In his famous essay of 1784, “What is Enlightenment?”, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,” which he defined as his “inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” Sapere aude!, cried Kant; “have the courage to use your own reason! – that is the motto of enlightenment.”

Quite honestly, we may be only one more terrorist attack away from a police state.

Despite the unifying patriotic rhetoric that permeates the United States, on some level Americans are not really fooled; at bottom, each person knows he or she must continually “reinvent themselves,” which is to say, go it alone. America is the ultimate anti-community.

American citizens cannot choose not to participate in the utterly fluid, high-pressure society that the United States has become. Liquid modernity is, in short, quite rigid: a world of compulsive self-determination.

On the grassroots level of people’s working lives, this merger of our identities with the economy is surely one of the most destructive aspects of the new globalized world order.

The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci pointed out long ago that if you capture people’s minds, their hands will follow. He called this “hegemony”, the symbolic level of the dominant culture that convinces people – the evidence of their lives notwithstanding – that this is the best of all possible worlds.

… “one dollar, one vote”, which is actually the description of a plutocracy.

Globalization is our destiny; it is, in effect, the final phase of capitalism. We did not evolve to this place by accident, and short of massive civilizational breakdown, there seems to be now way to alter this trajectory – not even slightly.

In the absence of broad structural awareness, alternatives to a world characterized by liquid modernity don’t have much of a chance. It is also the case that the absence of such alternatives is our consciousness is an inherent feature of this world. In such a context, anything truly different, and certainly anything truly creative, has to swim against an enormous tide of commercial garbage.

The fact is that liquid modernity has a strongly addictive quality to it: its participants are often convinced that death is actually life. In “The Numbing of the American Mind,” Thomas de Zengotita points out that it constitutes “a vast goo of meaningless stimulation.”

… the more money moves to the center of our lives, the more cynical we become about higher values. This … generates a culture of sensation, a longing for speed and excitement, because natural excitement is increasingly absent.

Modern American childhood … is for the most part an education in shopping.

The upshot of all of this is that school is turned into a venue for corporate and consumerist indoctrination – with the blessing of many schools and probably most of society.

The reason shows such as Seinfeld or Friends were so popular is that they depicted community situations – i.e., ones in which people hang out together on a daily basis and have a shared history. The irony of millions of isolated Americans sitting home alone and vicariously participating in a group experience that they themselves will never have, because they will never have it, hardly needs comment …

In what other context would we expect to find “reality” shows on TV, such as Survivor, in which screwing the other person is the name of the game, and which millions find vastly entertaining.

… “social capital”, the connections among individuals that are based on reciprocity and trust.

Shopping malls are now America’s most distinctive public space, and mall culture is about being in the presence of others, but not in their company.

… it is precisely in the declining phase of a civilization that it beats the drum of self-congratulation most fiercely.

Negative freedom … is essentially the freedom to be left alone. Societies without this type of freedom tend to be tribal (or organic) in nature, heavily dominated by custom and tradition. In those cultures, the separation of church and state – a mainstay of secular democracy – is usually absent.

As a California migrant worker once remarked to his family, on a return visit south of the border over the Christmas holiday, “The gringos don’t like to be reminded that they are corpses.”

… Osama’s laundry list of grievances … in particular the fact that the United States has inherited the mantle and pattern of nineteenth-century European imperialism: military garrisons, economic control, support for brutal leaders, exploitation of natural resources.

Beginning with the Wilson administration, taxes collected for individuals were used to provide corporations with loans and subsidies for overseas expansion.

Michael Hunt defines ideology as a structure of meaning that is part of the culture – so much a part, in our own case, that we take it for granted, are not really aware of it, and regard other ideologies as aberrant.

Americans still live in a world in which Anglos are on top, Europeans follow, and the Third (read: nonwhite) World sits at the bottom … Plainly put, Americans don’t respect cultural patterns different from their own, and this has facilitated an imperial foreign policy.

The American Dream involves something more comprehensive than just making money … it includes Americans’ vision of themselves as bringing freedom and the American way of life to the world, being atop a racial hierarchy (although this is no longer expressed overtly), and keeping political revolution at bay.

Across much of Asia and Latin America, our allies cared nothing for democracy; their allegiance was to our dollars, not to our values. Nor did we care, so long as they let us install military bases and said the “right” things.

Recall what [George] Kennan wrote: that the USSR viewed the outside world as hostile, was persuaded of its own doctrinaire rightness, insisted on the elimination of all competing powers and ideologies, believed that no opposition to them could possibly have any merit, and saw their regime as the only true one “in a dark and misguided world.” Let’s not kid ourselves: it would be hard to find a better description of American postwar foreign policy, right down to today.

It is this, to my mind, that makes [Carter] so unusual; it sets him off from presidents such as Reagan or Bush Jr. – men who were (are) very doctrinaire and who confuse(d) strength with rigidity (the American public does as well). Carter accepted compromises and contradictions when necessary, and saw the foreign policy arena as one necessarily fraught with conflict and inconsistency. Allied with this, he did not think in oppositional terms, and since that is all the media and public seem to be able to do, his message got lost.

It is no accident that [Carter] was defeated by an actor, a not terribly astute, sloganeering individual with an opposite modus operandi. Popularity with the media was at the top of Reagan’s list. He was not interested in the substantive details of foreign policy; he probably couldn’t even understand them. What interested the fortieth president was rhetoric, public appearances, and ceremonial duties. He had no intellectual curiosity whatsoever; his political philosophy amounted to little more than “us good, them bad”, and that was basically what most of the American people wanted to hear.

We love our large, energy-inefficient vehicles, and don’t seem to be too preoccupied with the fact that other peoples of the world have to die in large numbers so that we can live an extravagant and wasteful lifestyle.

Americans as a people don’t really like to look inward. Our feelings on the subject are much closer to, say, Bush Sr. than to Jimmy Carter. Whenever the elder Bush was asked probing questions, his immediate response was “Don’t stretch me out on the couch.”

[Andrew] Bacevich claims that [America] had a “globalization” strategy in the 1890s and that it was still operative one hundred years later. Then as now, the goal was to create an integrated international order that offered no barriers to the flow of goods, capital, and ideas, and that is administered by the United States.

The German philosopher Hegel referred to this as “negative identity,” the process of creating an identity for yourself by defining yourself against something. Ultimately, he said, it never works, for to say “I am not that” is at root empty; it doesn’t tell you who you actually are, and in essence enables you to hide from that question.

When you get down to it, globalization, besides being an updated euphemism for imperialism, is not much more than the elite version of shopping.

That September [2002], the White House released the “National Security Strategy” (NSS) … We shall “rid the world of evil”, it fatuously declares; we shall act preemptively; we shall act alone if necessary; and w shall decide who is or is not an enemy, and deserving of “regime change”. In a word, we are going to militarily rearrange the world to suit ourselves. The war on Iraq began almost exactly six months later.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker argues that the NSS was a “vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination.” The document, he claimed was a prescription for a benevolent American dictatorship, as well as for perpetual war. A regime in which the cops have to answer only to themselves, he pointed out, had a name: police state.

In the case of the Bush Doctrine, coupled with the Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties, I think it can be argued that we have been in the midst of a slow-motion coup d’êtat, one that has, in fact, been building since the late seventies, and that can now, in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, finalize its program for a one-party system and a theocratic plutocracy.

To realize their dream of a pax Americana, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. relied in the 1990s on a number of think tanks and front groups that have interlocking directorates and shared origins in those earlier organizations: the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, among others. They provided the Bush Jr. administration with policy advice and personnel. They also relied on right-wing media empires to blanket the public space with their message, in much the same way – if more powerfully – that the yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer did during the Spanish-American War. Thus Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda via Fox News, and the Weekly Standard is a mouthpiece for defense establishment intellectuals (for instance, Richard Perle, who is also a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute). There is also the National Interest and the Washington Times (the latter owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon), which also owns the UPI newswire. The result is a “seamless propaganda machine” that has effectively destroyed public discourse in the United States, to the point that we now dwell in a kind of right-wing propagandistic fog.

When individuals “get religion” – and there is really no other name for the Manichaean anticommunism that gripped America during the Cold War – reason and even common decency typically fly out the window, and the results are frequently horrific.

Our basic Middle Eastern policy is by now fully transparent to the Islamic world: the United States supports whoever serves and extends its power, and that can change at a moment’s notice.

On 1 November 1983 Secretary of State George Shultz received intelligence reports showing that Iraq was using chemical weapons almost daily. The following February, Iraq used large amounts of mustard gas and also the lethal never agent tabun (this was later documented by the United Nations); Reagan responded (in November) by restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq. He and Bush Sr. also authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals, anthrax, and bubonic plague.

An intellectual lightweight who didn’t really know what he was doing, Bush Sr. was quickly pushed aside by history after he had fulfilled his role as a catalyst for certain events. By the time his son came to power, the new world order – that is, global American hegemony and the final phase of empire – was pretty much in place. Being a lightweight – or a vacuous marionette, in George Jr.’s case – was not a liability but actually an asset; that Bush Jr. was (is) a hollow mouthpiece for a self-destructive imperial project is an arrangement that makes the project all that much easier to fulfill. That “he’s a real nowhere man” is not an obstacle for a nation sliding into chaos while it is trying to convince itself that it is in charge of the world. Indeed, it’s a perfect fit.

The “coalition” bombardment of Iraq began on 17 January 1991 (Baghdad time) and went on for forty-three days … As many as 200,000 people died. Targets chosen included water and sewage treatment plants, electrical generating plants, oil refineries, transportation networks, factories, bridges, roads, and irrigation systems, much of which bombing constituted violations of international law … There was also a kind of demonic violence exercised against retreating Iraqi forces, who were massacred in flight on February 26-27, after a cease-fire was already in place (also a war crime, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention).

… as philosopher Douglas Kellner points out, there was really no single reason that the United States went to war; rather, it was “overdetermined”, a confluence of political, economic, and military considerations all coming together. Yet the most suspicious aspect of the whole affair, according to foreign policy expert Christopher Layne, was the Bush administration’s inability to articulate a coherent rationale for it, which suggests that the core reason lay in the values and premises of the foreign policy elite – principles that they themselves couldn’t clearly articulate – regarding the concept of a new world order.

But whatever the U.S. policy has been on the [West Bank] settlement question, the one thing the United States has decidedly not done is force the issue by threatening to pull the plug on the huge amount of foreign aid it gives Israel each year. The reason for this lies in the latter’s role as our proxy in the Middle East.

The Nixon Doctrine – that certain countries in key regions of the world would play the role of “local police” under the direction of the U.S. ….

And because Israel serves as America’s proxy, supposedly protecting U.S. economic and strategic interests; because Muslims the world over know about the $3 billion subsidy and where Israeli weaponry comes from; because they see the United States consistently voting against the Palestinians, and for the Israelis, in the United Nations, even on human rights issues – for all these reasons, they despise the United States, and cite the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the key sticking point in their relations with the West.

The enemy – “evil” – can never be defeated by definition; there are no possible criteria for what a victory would consist of.

As the British journalist George Monbiot predicted even before the “National Security Strategy” was issued by the White House in September 2002, “If the U.S. were not preparing to attach Iraq, it would be preparing to attack another nation. The U.S. will go to war because it needs a country with which to go to war.”

… when a powerful nation can pick fights only with the small and the weak, it is because appearances to the contrary, it is weak itself.

… on 19 July 2004 Newsweek broke the story that the White House and the Justice Department had, for several months, been discussing the possibility of postponing the November 2 presidential elections, which would have been a first in American history, if it had come to pass. If power at all costs is the game, then democratic elections, protection against torture, civil liberties – all of the things we used to take for granted – become expendable, and practically overnight. As America morphed from a republic into an empire, these sorts of changes began to occur quite naturally, the unthinkable became perfectly thinkable, after all. Nor have most Americans, it must be said, been overly concerned about this new direction in which we are moving. Indeed, a large percentage of them are probably not even aware of it.

Two days after 9/11, Chalmers Johnson remarked in an interview, “I know it sounds cruel to say, but the people of New York were collateral damage of American foreign policy.”

In very rough terms, the central drama of American history is that of an expanding capitalist economy that gained momentum, moving faster and faster, feeding greedily on technological innovation (especially after World War II), eventually steamrolling all other values except those of a market economy, and heavily influencing U.S. foreign policy in its wake.

Our typical idea of the perfect vacation is to go somewhere that has escaped the ravages of “progress”, or that can create the illusion of having done so, because we are disgusted by urban decay and suburban sprawl and meaningless jobs to which we commute an hour or more every day.

“It has been our fate as a nation,” wrote Richard Hofstadter, “not to have ideologies, but to be one.” Americanism, in short: that is our religion.

As Clay McShane points out in Down the Asphalt Path, trolleys contradicted basic American values. They were dirty and overcrowded and made it impossible for the middle class to isolate itself from the lower classes – blacks and immigrants in particular. Meanwhile, by 1932 General Motors formed a consortium of tire, oil, and highway companies to buy and then shut down streetcar systems, bribing local officials when necessary. In the next quarter century, as 1974 Senate antitrust hearings revealed, GM, by means of monopolies and interlocking directorates, killed off more than a hundred electric surface rail systems in forty-five states.

From a European point of view, says sociologist Ray Oldenburg, American suburbs are like prisons. There is no contact between households, and one rarely knows one’s neighbors. There are no places to walk or cafes to sit where people drop in and socialize or read the newspaper.

Portland politics does not revolve around race because the place is one of the whitest cities around, and Oregon one of the whitest states. Given the absence of the “white flight” factor endemic to much of the United States, there hasn’t been that great a motivation for suburban housing in the greater Portland area.

The truth is that cities and civilization are nearly synonymous, and if the former die out, so do the latter. Nor does renaming a phenomenon change it. Techno-oriented or not, the new suburbs continue the trend of racial and class segregation; have not become independent economic entities; are destructive of the environment; epitomize the culture of consumption; and lack the diversity, cosmopolitanism, political culture, and public life that real cities have. The ethos of the technocity remains what the suburban ethos has always been: resistance to heterogeneity, and the desire to live apart.

.. the sad fact is that daily American life contains a great amount of violence and ignorance and is pervaded by a lot of (repressed) alienation and spiritual emptiness.

As Fareed Zakaria notes, the sacred cow in the United States is the American people, to which politicians have to pay ritual homage if they value their careers. No matter how manifestly stupid the people’s behavior is, American politician praise their sagacity. Uttering the phrase, “the American people”, says Zakaria, is tantamount to announcing a divine visitation; anything has the force of biblical revelation if it is ascribed to this mystical, all-knowing entity.

It seems to me that the people do get the government they deserve, and even beyond that, the government who they are, so to speak.

Shopping, of course, is a pretty pathetic religion, but if “God” can be said to be where someone puts most of their attention, then the data are in. Americans spend far more time in shopping malls that in church, for example, and by 1987 the country had more malls than high schools.

The basic perception of Americans from the outside is that we are children, adolescents at best, and Bush is just such a person.

Those of us who now have different values from the country may have to look elsewhere for hope, quality, humanism, and – possibly – freedom, which is not exactly what we had in mind when we were growing up.

Note that since World War II, we have avoided taking on an equal power. Our engagement with the Soviet Union itself was a balancing act involving the (often judicious) use of diplomacy. When we actually attacked, it was at the periphery: Korea (a stalemate); Vietnam (a defeat). Otherwise, the engagement consisted of covert operations against virtually defenseless nations or massive attacks on puny countries or tinpot dictators (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and so on).

Leaving its abysmal record on human rights aside, China is beginning to resemble the United States in Mandarin. It seems to have no larger vision, and there is absolutely no indications that its emergence as a superpower will herald a better world.

So many Americans posses what might be called a kind of “life stupidity”: they haven’t a clue as to what the good life really is. Like Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, they think it amounts to a single word: more.

… former Wall Street Journal reported Michael Ybarra, in Washington Gone Crazy, demonstrates quite clearly that the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and 1950s was not really a response to espionage or an external threat, but more fundamentally “a conservative reaction to the New Deal,” a long-standing series of resentments that included “rural rancor toward urban cities, nativist dread of encroaching minorities, fundamentalist anxieties over the spread of secular values,” and the like. When you add to these the contemporary hatred of knowledge and Enlightenment thinking, and the subliminal awareness that we have become unmoored and are basically failing as a nation, you have a rather potent brew on your hands.

QUOTATIONS

Robert Bellah
Our material success is our punishment, in terms of what that success has done to the natural environment, our social fabric, and our personal lives.

Cicero
Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.

Samuel Huntington
The West won the world not by its superiority in its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

H.L. Mencken
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more clearly, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Emmanuel Todd
Theatrical military activism against inconsequential rogue states … is a sign of weakness, not of strength … This is classic for a crumbling system … The final glory is militarism.

Polly Toynbee
God’s chosen people, uniquely blessed, nurture a self-image almost as deranged in its profound self-delusion as the old Soviet Union. The most advanced … nation on earth knows nothing of itself, irony-free and blind to the world around it.

Sharon Zukin
The seduction of shopping is not about buying goods. It’s about dreaming of a perfect society and a perfect self.