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

From the Publisher

"Provocative...stimulating and insightful."—Publishers Weekly

In Dark Ages America, the pundit Morris Berman argues that the nation has entered a dangerous phase in its historical development from which there is no return. As the corporate-consumerist juggernaut that now defines the nation rolls on, the very factors that once propelled America to greatness—extreme individualism, territorial and economic expansion, and the pursuit of material wealth—are, paradoxically, the nails in our collective coffin. Within a few decades, Berman argues, the United States will be marginalized on the world stage, its hegemony replaced by China or the European Union. With the United States just one terrorist attack away from a police state, Berman's book is a controversial and illuminating look at our current society and its ills.

Publishers Weekly

In this provocative, scattershot jeremiad, cultural historian Berman (The Twilight of American Culture) likens America to ancient Rome on the brink. On the geopolitical plane, he contends, the United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy, vulnerable to terrorist blowback and, worse, collapse if foreign creditors finally pull the plug. The rot is cultural and spiritual, too: Americans are cold, alienated shopaholics immured in suburban anomie, each encased in a private bubble of iTunes and media noise and indifferent to the public good. Culprits include globalization, technology and, more fundamentally, the individualism and commercialism that is the bedrock of American identity. Because American civilization is a "package deal," the author considers it impervious to piecemeal reform and, given Americans' ingrained "stupidity" and willful blindness, unsalvageable. Berman's attempts to tie every American dysfunction to an all-encompassing sickness of soul overreaches, leading him to lump together serious issues like poverty and the Abu Ghraib outrages with trivialities like annoying cell phone yakkers or the "freedom fries" phenomenon, which he bemoans as "symbolic of an emptiness at the core." Often stimulating and insightful in its particulars, his indictment, like the jingoism it abhors, is too sweeping and essentialist to fully capture American reality. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Freedom of choice? It's Wendy's vs. Burger King, according to Berman in this critique of the U.S. economy-a nice follow-up to The Twilight of American Culture, which condemned the country's corporate, consumerist culture. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A resounding, if sometimes overwrought, indictment of all that is wrong with American culture, from arrogance to xenophobia and all points between. As sociologist and cultural critic Berman (Wandering God, 2000) notes, the rest of the world hates us because we don't know it hates us-and don't much care. The American empire is both military and cultural, and both are weaker than we think; two pitiable Asian nations are enough to pin down our vaunted fighting forces, and "many of America's values in the early twenty-first century are corrosive, and unless the nation can do some rather elaborate soul searching, it needs to lose influence in the rest of the world." Neocons will dismiss the claim that America's influence is anything but benign, but Berman fires with both barrels at a culture that, he argues, is rapidly slipping into "second- or third-rate status" as an international power, to be replaced, one supposes, by China, which by Berman's account is just an Asian iteration of the same problem, in which society is an arena for personal enrichment with none of the requisite reciprocal obligations. The great mass of Americans, by Berman's depiction, live lives driven by "infantile needs and impulses," thereby-and here he grows breathless-making possible a society marked by latchkey kids, college graduates who can't find America on a world map, idiotic television shows, obese mall-goers, knee-jerk reactionaries and a president who "lack[s] the ground-level gray matter necessary for the job." Not that it's all Bush's fault. By Berman's lights, he's a symptom-but also a cause, a perfect exemplar of a Darwinian society that doesn't believe in Darwinism, a country of a few wealthy people andof "competition, extreme individualism, and loneliness forced onto everybody else," what passes for freedom these days. There's no room for comfort in Berman's critique: If he's right, we're doomed. Hope he's wrong, then, but by all means consider his provocative argument.

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Product Details

• ISBN: 0393329771
  
• ISBN-13: 9780393329773
• Format: Paperback, 400pp
• Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
• Pub. Date: April 2007
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 400,628

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents