Dark Age America -- a blog

An expatiate's point of view


An astute social critic for many years Morris Berman recently had this to say:

I have to admit to my own lack of imagination. When I wrote Twilight (2000), or DAA (2006), or WAF (2011), the 2017 scenario of the endgame never once entered my mind. Maybe it would have, if I had written a book of cartoons. There are a number of ways a civilization can collapse, of course, but death by absurdity was one I just never thought of.

I found the following blog entry very insightful and motivated me to look at this book again as I did not really pay attention to it at the time.

  
    I've been rereading a book I 1st read many years ago, "The Denial of Death," by Ernest Becker. His argument is that we take on symbolic 'immortality projects'--for example, the American Dream--in order to hide from our mortality; to deny death. This project gives people the feeling that there is meaning in their lives. But because the project is essentially arbitrary, and sits on a volcano (the fear of death), it is endowed with a kind of ferocity. He thus writes that we "wheel and deal in an idiot frenzy"--a perfect description of hustling America. All of this, he says, explains the phenomenon of depression. People start to feel that their immortality project is false, that they've been sold a bill of goods; or they feel that they cannot be successful, be a 'hero', in terms of that immortality project. (I would add, they can probably feel both emotions at the same time.) The result is that they are reminded of their mortality, and their feelings of worthlessness.
     This goes a long way to explaining Trump--an illusory life-raft against the collapse of the American Dream, the promise to restore it--and also, the genocide we visit on other peoples, and the rage we see at home. Police are mowing down unarmed civilians at an alarming rate, and civilians are mowing down each other. The degree of all this was dramatically lower 20 years ago. At that time, it would be unthinkable that someone would be so offended at an oversight of not receiving bacon on their cheeseburger, that they would return to McDonald's with a machine gun and hose the place down. This would seem to be the stuff of (surreal) comedy, yet it happens all the time. Americans are depressed, bitter, and spiritually lost as a result of their immortality project having failed them--or of them, having failed it--and are going over the top on a daily basis as a result. (The stats: there is now more than one massacre a day in the US, now, defined as the killing and/or maiming of 4 or more individuals.) We are, to quote Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying of the light. There are of course better ways of reacting to our individual and national decline, but neither the country nor its inhabitants are likely to find them. All we have ever known, in America, is blind impulse, and all indications are that that is not going to change.

Morris Berman is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness–-The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)

http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/