From "Dark Ages America" by Morris Berman

“In Plato’s Cave” Alvin Kernan, who taught English at Yale and Princeton for many years, describes the “tectonic shift” that took place in the academy over the course of his professional career. The old university, prior to postmodernism and political correctness, entertained Enlightenment goals that energized it. All this is gone now says Kernan; postmodernism brought to the table not merely the denial of truth but also the denial of the ideal of truth. Facts are now regarded as a “fetish”, all methodology is “problematic”, and sometimes even the highest forms of culture are despised. When feminists – in this case Susan McClary – can say that Beethoven’s Ninth symphony is filled with “the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release,” we see how nakedly sick the deconstructive enterprise finally is. This is not merely intellectual failure; it is moral failure as well.

The corporate consumerism functions as a kind of “skin” that covers everything, like an all-encompassing mantle – a total environment, as it were. (Calvin Coolidge: “The business of America is business.”) This is our ethos, our civilizational essence. “There is barely an empty space in our culture,” writes social critic James Twitchell, “not already carrying commercial messages”. Or, as George Steiner once put it, we live in a “systematic suppression of silence.”

One effect of this commercial domination of our lives is the pervasiveness of kitsch, or hype, as a part of collective spiritual death. In his book “BAD, or the Dumping of America” Paul Fussell defines kitsch as “something phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant, or boring, that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright, or fascinating”. He cites Lawrence Welk and George Bush as obvious examples, but this is the tip of the iceberg, for the truth is that kitsch is our culture. In the United States, writes Fusell, “nothing will thrive unless inflated by hyperbole gilded with fine coat of fraud.” Content does not really matter, because it is always the same: Slogans work; hype is life. We live in a collective adrenalin rush, a world of endless promotional-commercial bullshit that masks a deep systematic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma. 

This phenomenon of the “skin” of mass consumerism shows up everywhere, so we have become a nation unable to think except by means of slogans. A few books are published on incest survivors and suddenly overnight, hundreds of thousands of women discover that this is what they are (and some, of course, are). Men go to men’s workshop and cry because they are told they must learn to become sensitive. Joseph Campbell, whose understanding of mythology was woefully inadequate, from an anthropological standpoint, tells TV viewers to “follow your bliss,” and this becomes their life theme, as they remain blissfully unaware of the fact that real spirituality is most often a working against the grain. “Consciousness” gurus declare that we are in the midst of a “paradigm shift,” and millions, who never managed to understand the present paradigm, grunt the phrase like a mantra. Each year (or, sometimes month) there is a new slogan to get jazzed up about, taken to the extreme, and then summarily dropped for the next exciting new slogan that comes along.  “Thinking” now means nothing more than wandering through the latest mental theme park.

The inevitable result of all this is the inability of the American public to distinguish garbage from quality; in fact, as Paul Fusell points out, they identify garbage as quality. Thus, for example, the rise of the huge New Age industry, immensely successful financially, and based on the premise that your rational mind is your worst enemy. The rubbish content of this stuff, such as “Mutant Messages Down Under”, or “The Celestine Prophecy” is phenomenal, and sales are in direct proportion of it. Robert Fulghum, a former Seattle high school teacher who told his readers that history should be replaced by myth and that everything they needed to know in life they learned in kindergarten, was at least completely candid about the source of his success, stating that his books were popular because people were searching for simple answers to complex problems. 

An equivalent phenomenon is Deepak Chopra, who publishes books with titles such as “Escaping the Prison of the Intellect.” On one level, he has a point, in that we can get caught up in cognitive categories, to the detriment of reality. All well and good. The problem is that Chopra seems to be addressing an audience that for the most part hasn’t managed to find its way into the “prison of the intellect” in the first place. It is one thing to see the limits of the Enlightenment tradition after you have studied it for a few decades. It’s another to reject it before you have ever been exposed to it. Some time ago Bruce Barcott, a Seattle writer and reporter, attended one of Chopra’s workshops, which typically draw huge crowds, and took notes for three days. He then wrote an article describing the event, relating how, when he got home and read over his notes, he discovered that they consist of empty platitudes. It is perhaps striking that in a room of several hundred people, this reporter may have been the only individual not sitting there in a state of rapt adoration, regarding the platitudes as profundities.

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Our purported material wealth is, quite clearly, heavily skewed toward the wealthy; but even beyond that, as Mother Teresa said when she visited America, we are poor nation overall in the spiritual sense. America’s poverty is worse than that of India’s, for it is that of a terrible loneliness that come from wanting the wrong things.

I recall, several decades ago, my high school history teacher telling the class that the United States was different from, say, India, because we were not “primitive”. As an example of this “primitiveness” she cited a newspaper article that described people in India getting crushed to death by a stampede of the devoted during some Hindu ritual. Well, I would agree, that’s pretty bad – barbaric, in fact. But before we start shaking our fingers, let’s consider an event that took place on 28 November 2003 in Orange City, Florida. A woman in line at a Wal-Mart store to buy a DVD player (on sale) was literally trampled underfoot by frenzied shoppers, who would not even get out of the way when the ambulance crew came to take her to the hospital. The paramedics found her slumped unconscious over a DVD player, while (the Chicago Tribune reported) “seemingly oblivious shoppers all around her continued to snap up items.” Newspapers labeled the shoppers as “a frothing mob”, and indeed there is nothing  less barbaric or demented about this than there is about the Hindu mob deplored by my history teacher. In fact it’s worse: at least the Hindus were frothing about Shiva or Vishnu; the Americans, about Sony or Panasonic. “What went wrong?”

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The concept of national character is very much out of fashion these days, violating as it does the much more popular notion of multiculturalism. Surely in a land as diverse as ours, containing large percentages of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, for example, it makes no sense to speak of a central net of traits that characterize “the American people”. There are, so the argument goes, many Americas, not just a single (let alone a unified) one. And yet, once we get past the tedious rhetoric of political correctness and identity politics, what do we see? Blacks and Hispanics for all their community and family and (often) religion orientations, essentially want a larger share of the economic pie. That is their “vision” of America, and for themselves in America. A few disaffected white liberals aside, the only people who view the American Dream as a nightmare, are the Native Americans, and then only some of them. In fact, any group or individual that rejects the dominant ethos in this country and sees it as a species of illness is going to pay a very high price. Regardless of race, religion, historical background, or country of origin, everybody in the United States is effectively a Protestant capitalist individualist whose life is grounded in the ideology of an expending market economy. When it comes down to the basis, America is about as diverse as a one-string guitar.