History of Progress
In historiography, the Idea of Progress is the theory that advances in technology, science, and social organization inevitably produce an improvement in the human condition. That is, people can become happier in terms of quality of life (social progress) through economic development and the application of science and technology (scientific progress). The assumption is that the process will happen once people apply their reason and skills, for it is not divinely foreordained. The role of the expert is to identify hindrances that slow or neutralize progress.
Alex:
What happens when you try telling people that it’s an idea or article of faith as opposed to a Law?
15 November 2011, 2:29 pmMichael Anderson:
It seems progress goes hand in hand with ignoring the plight of those who are invaded, colonized, dominated, and used by those who are trying to make “progress” for themselves. Human selfishness…
17 November 2011, 2:43 amManuel Garcia, Jr.:
Hi Stan,
Just wanted you to know that I’ve got a new e-mail address, and a brand new blog, which is where my current Internet Bibliography is stored (the link you presently have for me, on the right, is frozen in time).
As to the question here, we can see progress in the long term, generally, based on industrial/technical development; but we can also see degradation (negative progress) sporadically in the short term, scattered about in geography and history, brought about by natural catastrophes as well as man-made ones (e.g., earthquakes, floods, war, rapid environmental damage, e.g., bad farming).
Because of population growth, the net advance of material progress available (or, that can be experienced) locally may not have fully compensated for the population growth (and other recent “negative” history & economic stresses), so it is possible to have a “more advanced” society in a “more distressed” condition than may have been true of ancestors of certain periods.
Also, there may be long term effects of degradation (desertification, global warming related climate changes) that will negate some of the advantages made possible by the long term advance of industrial/technical development. This weaving of the plus/minus effects of long term trends of industrial/technical improvements and population growth (whose plus effect is productivity growth) makes it difficult to give an unequivocal answer to your question, without examining data that quantifies what I’ve glossed over with generalities here.
What you want is a history of the Human Development Index (HDI), which are tabulated for about 184 nations, calculated and mapped over historical timescales. HDIs are tabulated annually (by the UN), but the data is only for recent times. What you really want is some kind of HDI(x, y, t) AND HDI(p, t), where x = longitude, y = latitude, t = time, and p = population/ethnic group; and you want this data from way back. If you had such data, then you could map the local quality-of-life over history, as well as the quality-of-life of a designated population over its history.
At my blog, I have an entry called “energy for human development” which has reports on the relationship between the availability of energy and national quality-of-life. In this there is an explanation of HDI. Also, you can learn about HDI from wikipedia (good article), and directly from the UN (its Development agency web site). One finding in my reports, which is not surprising, is that bad social policy makes for greater inefficiency in gaining quality-of-life for the per capita expenditure of energy.
If the world ever went through a catastrophic climate change brought about by an excessive build-up of global warming (e.g., shift of the thermohaline cycle), or if a global nuclear war broke out and we had and “On The Beach” scenario of world-killing fallout, then we could say “no,” technical/industrial development did not lead to an ultimate improvement in the human condition, but it sure looked like it had, for centuries, until nearly the end. I worked out the expected HDI for such eventualities, it is negative infinity.
28 November 2011, 2:36 amSam:
Progress in Social Justice:
Justice at Last
by Fred Reed
Recently by Fred Reed: One Man’s Angle on Mexico
The Look Like America bill, originally H.R. 1533, seemed a perfectly ordinary piece of feel-good legislation when proposed by Barack Osama Obama. “Our diversity is our strength,” he said. “We must increase the representation of minorities in our institutions to reflect our diverse population and ensure the fairness for which America stands.” Congress passed the bill without reading it. It was the sort of thing one passed. Besides, there was no money involved, and the bill was not obviously anti-Semitic.
Not obviously. But then one of the obscure policy shops that abound in Washington, the Committee for Ethnic Piety, filed suit against Harvard for noncompliance. The proximate cause was an article in the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper, about a course called Math 55, the hardest math course at the university and thus, Harvard liked to think, in America. The students in Math 55, reported the Crimson, were 45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, and 100 percent male. The class didn’t, said the Committee for Ethnic Piety, look like America.
It certainly didn’t.
Harvard, ever sensitive to questions of justice, which it conflated with federal funding, agreed to make the class Look Like America. The administration asserted that only through inadvertence had it failed to notice the clear racism, sexism, and continent-ism occurring under its nose. It established a committee of reform, which set to work.
The first and most ticklish hurdle was The Jewish Question. Jews were two percent of the American population. At 45 percent in Math 55, they were over-represented by a factor of over twenty. The injustice was undeniable. Two percent of a class of twenty-five meant that Math 55 should contain half a Jew. It would then look like America. The Jewish students would have to go.
As news of the proposed ethnographic hecatomb spread across the country, alarm erupted among the prejudiced. Over seven hundred departments of engineering across the country protested. They could see where Looking Like America was going. Math departments, Silicon Valley, the National Institutes of Health – all reeked of injustice, meaning Koreans, Jews, Indians, and Chinese, and were conscious of sin. They didn’t Look Like America. They Looked Like Math 55. In the Bay area, the proportion of geniuses from India in computing was alarmingly high. Some laboratories Looked Like the Punjab. These malefactors knew well that the coming of justice would gut their enterprises.
Desperate to maintain their positions of racial and patriarchal privilege, they pointed out that the Jewish kids, like all the students in Math 55, had 800 math Boards and had done things like independently develop tensor calculus by the age of three. The view from the Gulch was expressed off-the-record by Dr. Gud Soma Darjeeling, president of Santa Clara Neurocomputing, which employed seventy PhDs in solid-state physics, including three Anglos. “Look, the US is in intellectual collapse. The average American university wouldn’t qualify as a high-school in Japan. It’s crazy. The whole world know it’s crazy. But take out the Kims, Khans, Nguyens, Wangs, and Cohens, and what’s left is Albania in 1750.”
The lead attorney for CEP, Patricia Mikoyan-Gurevich, wasn’t having it.
“Ability doesn’t exist, and occurs equally in all groups, and anyway justice is more important than patriarchal-racist abstractions. Sexism is clear at Harvard. When an entire class is male, it isn’t by accident.”
With this, no one was in disagreement.
Asians were as problematic as Jews. If a Jewish population of two percent required half a Jew in a class of twenty-five, then a six percent population of Asians required an Asian-and-a-half. Various solutions were proposed. Perhaps a short, lightweight Gujarati would do, or maybe a prodigy of ten from Mumbai. Otherwise, admitting three Asians every two years might serve.
The paucity of females in Math 55 was easier to address. Harvard had already established that there was no difference in mathematical ability by firing a president who thought there might be. Since ability didn’t exist and was found equally in everyone, the sexual balance was quickly rendered equitable by eliminating entrance requirements.
Harvard then set about the intricate matter of making the class thirteen percent black, sixteen percent Hispanic, a tenth of a percent Iroquois, and so on.
Meanwhile, CEP turned its attention to the lush pastures of music. The New York Philharmonic, being in New York, was discovered to consist disproportionately of Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and so on. It Looked Like New York, which wouldn’t do. The American Association of the Musically Hopeless, consisting of the deaf, tone-deaf, mutes, and amputees, filed suit on grounds that their membership was not represented at all. (They carefully overlooked the fact that they were over-represented among rock bands.) This brought up an important juridical question: Since most Americans could not play an instrument, should not the orchestra reflect this?
Thirteen years after the passage of the Look Like America bill, the United States ranked in international measures of mathematics just behind the Central African Republic, the New York Phil couldn’t play Happy Birthday, and racial and sexual justice flourished. Yet the vexed problem of Math 55 had not been entirely solved. Progress had been made, yes. The class looked almost like America, counting on its fingers and showing no trace of patriarchalism, which in any event it couldn’t spell. However, CEP’s Committee on Oppressed and Marginalized Indigenous Peoples of Color noted that the class contained no student from oppressed peoples of the Amazon rain forest. CEP regarded national boundaries as essentially phallic, since they were longer than they were wide, and thus beneath notice.
Harvard, distraught at finding yet another instance of its institutional racism, cast about for a suitable indigene.
After a laborious search the university discovered Wunxputl, a member of the Tloxyproctyl tribe of the Amazon Basin, consisting of twelve people who lived on yams and the flesh of the Three-Toed Sloth. Wunxputl was at Wellesley, where he served in a minor administrative position that had no responsibilities. He had been brought there seven years earlier by the anthropology department, so it could atone for White Guilt. It didn’t matter that Wellesley was guilty of nothing. The atonement was a pleasant form of narcissism, allowing the faculty to congratulate themselves on their moral purity.
Harvard arranged with Wellesley to borrow Wunxputl for three minutes every seven years, which it had calculated would satisfy the demands of ethnic proportionality. Justice, at last, had been achieved
30 November 2011, 11:54 pmm.c.:
From a Mass-Production(the students they produce) standpoint, the top U.S. Universities do pretty well as far as Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine, and Business. My primary concern is the lack of Critical Thinking Ability, which includes the Humanities and Social Sciences. A U.K. ranking system a few years ago said 17/top 20 & 35/top 50 Universities were in the U.S. I don’t necessarily agree totally with these numbers; but my point is compared with Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, etc. the average U.S. high school education is sadly lacking. We are, I believe the only nation in the world which primarily funds its public elementary & high schools through Local Property Taxes. High Unfair! If We lived in Plato’s Philosopher Heaven, it wouldn’t matter if the bottom 80% of a Society were illiterate or not. Plato wanted them as slaves or shoe makers.
1 December 2011, 1:14 pmSome type of Representative Government though means the bottom 80% needs to know what the f— is going on….
m.c.:
I want to recall that was from a Times of London Higher Education Supplement. Oqwned of course by U.S.-Centric Rupert Murdoch.
2 December 2011, 1:13 pmm.c.:
A year or two ago, Tom Hayden was on the TV being interviewed; he mentioned that in the 1960′s when he was a student at the Univ. Michigan, tuition was either $100 or $200 per semester. He said it was very easy to save up over the summer months with a job and then pay the tuition bill in full when registering for classes in the Fall. The University Financing Institutional Complex must be in cahoots with the Colleges which jack up the fees every year leaving grads with a mass of bills/debt and a bleak job landscape….
2 December 2011, 7:02 pmSam:
A Culture in Regression
We Don’t Need No Steenking Books
September 10, 2011
The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know. Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?
No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millenia. They cannot. They do not even know why.
Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the first American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.
Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.
And they rule. We have achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hod-carriers in designer jeans, they do not quite burn books but simply ignore them. Their college degrees amount to high-school diplomas, if that, but they neither know nor care.
The things that have forever constituted civilization—respect for learning whether one had it or not, wide reading, careful use of language, manners, such notions as “lady” and “gentleman”–these are held in contempt.
Yet ours is a curious bleakness. Good things of everywhere and all time lie free for the having. When I was a child, you went to a library for books and the libraries often didn’t have many. Today you can get even the Chinese classics, or those of Greece and Rome, or almost any book ever written in any language, from the web in five minutes. Do you want Marvin Minsky on finite automata? Papinian and Ulpian on Roman law? Balzac? Raymond Chandler? Tolkien? All are there. The same is true for any music, any painting, any movie, almost any historical curiosity: Ozzie and Harriet, Captain Video, Plastic Man. You can have cultivated friends in Katmandu or Uyuni in the Bolivian altiplano, and talk to them face-to-face with Skype.
This is news to no one. Yet it may prove important in ways we do not think. The internet allows an electronic community of those who have not been peasantrified. On the Web, learning and taste will live or, perhaps I should say, hide out. When there is no longer enough interest in books to support bookstores—they close now in droves—the residual demand integrated over the surface of the earth will provide enough of a market to keep the One True Bookstore, Amazon, going. Project Gutenberg will do the same for works not in copyright.
Things grow worse for the many but better for the few.
Odd: In one sense the internet is highly democratizing, giving any teenager in Tennessee resources greater than those of the Library of Congress. It does this euqally for a Cambodian teenager in Battambang. A bright youngster can learn almost anything with a cheap computer and broadband: mathematics, literature, languages.
The net also allows a terribly needed aristocracy, by which I mean not a govermental arrangement but the community of those of discrimination. They will shortly amount to a secret society, perhaps with a distinctive hand-shake for mutual recognition. It could become dangerous to speak correct English. It would indicate Elitism. We live in a society in which elitism is thought far more criminal than mere pederasty or cannibalism.
“Elitism” of course means only the principle that the better is preferable to the worse, but society today, except in matters of football, believes the worse to be preferable to the better. (One does not readily imagine a quarterback being urged to lower his passing percentage so as not to wound the self-esteem of his colleagues.)
It is literally true that the better is suspect. If you correct a high-school teacher’s grammar, she will accuse you of stultifying creativity, of racism, of insensitiviy. If you reply that had you wanted your children brought up as baboons, you would have bought baboons in the first place, she will be offended.
Home-schooling, it seems to me, becomes a towering social responsibility. I have actually seen a teacher saying that parents should not let children learn to read before they reach school. You see, it would put them out of synch with the mammalian larvae that children are now made to be. Bright children not only face enstupiation and hideous boredom in schools taught by complacent imbeciles. No. They are also encouraged to believe that stupidity is a moral imperative.
Once they begin reading a few years ahead of their grade, which commonly is at once, school becomes an obstacle to advancement. This is especially true for the very bright. To put a kid with an IQ of 150 in the same room with a barely literate affirmative-action hire clocking 85 is child abuse.
Essential, even crucial, to the preservation of civilization in the deepening gloom is a grim, intransigent determination not to apologize. You cannot cleanse the schools of teachers who barely speak English. The country is too far gone. But you needn’t be cowed into regarding cretins as other than cretins. In front of your kids especially, don’t be cowed. If your child in the second grade is readfing at the level of the sixth grade, she (I have daughters, which clouds my mind) she is superior. It is not that “she tests well,” with the subtle implication that testing well is some sort of trick, having nothing to do with intelligence, which doesn’t exist. She is smart, literate,
superior (oh, forbidden word).
She will have figured out the “smart” part anyway. You need only to let her know that smart is a good thing.
In an age of blinkered specializaton perhaps we should revive the idea of the Renaissance man. Today the phrase is quaint and almost condescending (though how do you condescend up?), arousing the mild admiration one has for a dancing dog. A time was when the cultivated could play an instrument, paint, knew something of mathematics and much of languages, traveled, could locate France, attended the opera and knew what they were attending. They wrote clearly and elegantly, this being a mark of civilization. I think of Benvenuto Cellini, born 1500, superb sculptor, professional musician, linguist, elegant writer, and good with a sword.
If there is any refuge, it is the internet. Let us make the most of it.
16 January 2012, 3:09 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Sam—right on—I forwarded Fred Reed widely!
17 January 2012, 2:44 pmJosiah:
Sam, although there are kernels of truth in the article you posted, it is little more than another iteration of the “decline of the West” genre of (highly raced and gendered) fuddy-duddy paleoconservatism. All I hear is a deeply reactionary axe grinding away when I read sentences like:
“Music gives way to angry urban grunting.”
Right, like Saul Williams or Jill Scott.
“You cannot cleanse the schools of teachers who barely speak English.”
Okay, I doubt he’s not talking about immigrant teachers here, but talk of “cleansing” the stupid smacks of the logic of eugenics.
“It could become dangerous to speak correct English. It would indicate Elitism. We live in a society in which elitism is thought far more criminal than mere pederasty or cannibalism.”
Contrary to the writer’s mythologizing, there has never been a time in history of English-speaking countries when the majority of people spoke, or even necessarily venerated, “correct English”. This man needs to read some Bernard Shaw, stat.
“If you correct a high-school teacher’s grammar, she will accuse you of stultifying creativity, of racism, of insensitiviy [sic]. If you reply that had you wanted your children brought up as baboons, you would have bought baboons in the first place, she will be offended.”
Where is this planet the writer lives on, where innocent white families are forced to allow incompetent black teachers to miseducate their children on pains of being called racist? The majority of white children have white teachers, and alleged incompetence of teachers in general is greatly exaggerated in this and similar discourse.
“superior (oh, forbidden word).”
So, according to him, the problem with our society is too much egalitarianism.
“In an age of blinkered specializaton perhaps we should revive the idea of the Renaissance man. Today the phrase is quaint and almost condescending (though how do you condescend up?), arousing the mild admiration one has for a dancing dog. A time was when the cultivated could play an instrument, paint, knew something of mathematics and much of languages, traveled, could locate France, attended the opera and knew what they were attending.”
Right, because the only answer is to go back to the last great golden age of Western Civilization, before the barbarians started taking over. You known, when a man could really be a man…
“And they rule. We have achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
17 January 2012, 10:22 pmm.c.:
Civic Engagement/Life Skills/ etc. may be more important than IQ & fancy diplomas??? Are schools teaching real skills or just Test Taking so school administ. looks good on paper….
18 January 2012, 6:30 pmSam:
Josiah, I think there are boulders of truth in it, and not just kernels. And I agree, it is deeply reactionary. You may congratulate yourself for “going with the flow” of the times, if you like. I think there is plenty to “react” against, and he is spot on. As for the “fuddy-duddy” part, that is a pure subjectivism on your part, and I resist labeling people, such as being “paleoconservative” and the like. In any case, many things are worth conserving, just as many are not. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the man, or to what extent, it is clearly the case he is a decent man, intelligent and principled, and therefore a valid interlocutor. People with principles are generally not interested in pleasing any and everyone and also are perfectly aware that it is not possible to do so. I might add that he also has a great sense of humor, which is usually a good sign.
18 January 2012, 8:59 pmm.c.:
Henry Merritt Wriston(1889-1978); President of Brown Univ.(1937-1955) wrote a book called The Nature of a Liberal College. One of his quotes which I’m recalling from memory is: The Central Purpose of a College/ University Education should be the Increase of Knowledge, the Inculcation of Wisdom, the Growth of Spiritual Awareness, and the Refinement of Emotional Responses.
Now these topics are pretty broad. But you get some idea. Maybe a Sense of Historical Perspective should be in there too as well as a glimpse of ‘The Big Picture.’
Footnote: I’m not totally opposed to Standardized Testing. They have some usefulness.
19 January 2012, 12:44 pmJosiah:
Sorry, but no amount of valid (if unoriginal) critique of today’s hyper-consumerist, techo-narcissistic youth culture can excuse transparently Negrophobic/Dunning school-esque rants about “angry urban grunting,” “baboons,” and how we sadly “cannot cleanse the schools of teachers who barely speak English.”
I’m sure the author is genuinely concerned for the future, and rightly so; he identifies lots of real problems, even if he distorts others. I can’t write an adequate response; Vivian Gornick said it much better than I can in a beautiful essay on the connection between good writing an empathy for the subject (something I think Stan does extremely well in his writings on war, Christianity, suburbia, and so-called “red America”):
“Fiction is the genre that lets [D.H.] Lawrence expand within himself: the proof that he is a born novelist but only on occasion an essayist. Here, in “Do Women Change?” [Lawrence's snide dismissal of "liberated" women in the 1920s] he cannot manage it. Women remain an undynamic “them.” It’s the absence of dynamism that keeps the essay static, stifles its growth from within.
There is another writer who demonstrates repeatedly–and in exactly the same way as Lawrence–that he is an inspired writer of novels but not of nonfiction. V.S. Naipaul’s vision of life is fundamentally cold, devoid in some important way of human warmth. Nevertheless, in his novels the coldness is made to burn. [...] In the nonfiction, the absence of sympathy is startling–and fatal. A perfect example of this striking differential is to be found in reading Naipaul’s novel “Guerillas” together with “The Killings in Trinidad.” Both are derived from the same newspaper story about a madman who became a self-styled black radical leader and ended up performing ritual murder on a number of his followers, including an upper-class Englishwoman who’d fallen under his spell. The novel is mysteriously injected with a power of dread that is so penetrating it endows the work with visionary properties: the situation becomes metaphoric. In the essay the principals–all of them, victims and victimizer alike–are presented like bugs under glass: shrunken, pinned, diminished. In the end, the reader registers only the nastiness of the writer’s feelings. He is standing too far back to achieve the right distance: the one necessary for engagement.
In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary [and this is really what I wish the author would consider] not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension.”
You know, like more than crude stereotypes.
19 January 2012, 5:42 pmSam:
Por favor!
20 January 2012, 12:01 pmm.c.:
In my further attempt to de-mystify What a College/University Education does or offers:
Was it Samuel Johnson who famously quipped, “There are as many fools at a University as there are anywhere else. But their folly has a certain stamp to it, a trained folly.”
There is an assumption that an educated person can adequately communicate by either being able to write and/or speak clearly.
20 January 2012, 2:19 pmCurt:
I like the series Parks and Recreation. It is not without a flaw or two but usually I hate comedy. Parks and Recreation gets poor ratings. Am I an elietist becasue I like the program? I suspect that I probably am.
23 January 2012, 4:05 amIs an elietist kind of like being a dictator? I suspect that it is. A few of the P and R episodes that I have seen have been a bit raunchy but compared to other US sitcoms that I have seen it is a very classy production. If it were up to me the US population were to have a choice. When it comes to sitcoms they could warch Parks and Recreation and programs that measure up to it, or they couild watch nothng at all. Either way the American people wouild win. They would either become more intellegent or they would lose weight.
If that were to happen it might actually borther me. Americans might just become experts in their field at something important. The who would I make fun of?
Henry:
Found at idleworm.com/blog
From “The Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell, 1937:
“To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanisation. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense – the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; [b]look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer.[/b] Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilisation within a few months. Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.”
23 January 2012, 11:44 pmHenry:
The Decline of the American Empire
by Kirkpatrick Sale
…a devastating and eviscerating critique proving convincingly that America has failed, and abominably, even tragically…
I cannot overemphasize how essential this wisdom is to any comprehension of America today, or tomorrow, or how powerfully Morris Berman (an academic historian who has emigrated to Mexico) makes his case. It is not a long book (196 pages, plus backmatter), but it is replete with overwhelming evidence to support the thesis, as he puts it on his first page:
The principal goal of North American civilization, and of its inhabitants, is and always has been an ever-expanding economy – affluence – and endless technological innovation – “progress.” A nation of hustlers, writes [Walter] McDougall, a people relentlessly on the make.
From the very start, from the Puritans’ shining “city on a hill” and the Jamestown settlement’s conquest and exploitation of Indian lands, this country has been about making and taking, a business culture with a commercial orientation, devoted to growth and power, wealth and property, private advancement and profit, militarism and materialism, expansion and empire. John Adams saw it at the beginning: the U.S. was “more Avaricious than any other Nation that ever existed.” Or as de Tocqueville was to say later: “As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”
Let it be acknowledged that, given this as its goal and ideal, this nation has done pretty well…
but we have acquired a host of evils and sorrows along with material prosperity. Berman compiles a whole raft of rather depressing facts that show what the downside of the technocommerial society is: mass unemployment, foreclosures, increasing poverty for the many (with corporate bailouts and bonuses for the egregious few); a criminal culture with the highest rate of homicide in the world and a corrections system that contains 25 per cent of all the world’s prisoners; a high incidence of violence throughout the culture, including crime, domestic violence, and warfare, along with movies, TV, and video games; a social numbness and clinically diagnosed “empathy deficit disorders”; consumption of two-thirds of the global market in antidepressants with at least 164 million users; a rank on the worldwide Happy Planet Index in 2009 of 150th; fully 25 per cent of American households had only one person, a rate of aloneness probably the highest in the world. Or, as Berman puts it at one point:
The culmination of a hustling, laissez-faire capitalist culture is that everything gets dumbed down, that all significant questions are ignored, and that every human activity is turned into a commodity, and anything goes if it sells. What we have is domination by corporate media, politics via poll-driven sound bites, a foreign policy based on unilateralism and preemptive strikes, a failing newspaper industry, a poorly informed citizenry, the unemployed winding up destitute, weak (or no) mass transit systems, and a health care system that ranks thirty-seventh in the world.
Berman spends a good deal of time talking about the “alternative culture” to all this, including “a commitment to craft, community, the public good, the natural environment, spiritual practice, and the “simple life,” and he shows that its adherents and champions have existed all along, though of course overwhelmed by the dominant culture. He cites, for example, Thoreau, Melville, Henry Adams, Veblen, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Ruskin and Morris and the craft movement, Eric Fromm, Lewis Mumford (on whom he justly spends many pages), the Southern Agrarians, Robert Redfield, Vance Packard, William A. Williams, Marcuse, Ellul, Roszak, Schumacher, Lasch, Wendell Berry, and more recently Jerry Mander, Langdon Winner, Neil Postman, and somewhat surprisingly Ted Kaczynski. This is a distinguished bunch, and they are known today because the work they did was careful and trenchant and exposed powerfully the ills of a material society, but, as Berman notes when talking about Mumford, in the end “you can’t get taken seriously if you point this out.” How well I know.
Which is why in the end Berman concludes that nothing will ever change our hustling civilization and all attempts at trying to replace it are fruitless: “I regard the fantasy of a recovered future as pure drivel.” He sees, instead, that it is headed toward inevitable collapse, and not too many decades away. He quotes a U.S. intelligence report from the Washington Post that predicts “a steady decline” in American dominance in the coming decades, the country eroding “at an accelerating pace” in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas,” to which he adds, “Nothing could be more obvious.”
http://lewrockwell.com/orig10/sale8.1.1.html
From Amazon:
Praise for
Why America Failed
“Morris Berman is one of our most prescient and important social and cultural critics…The collective retreat into self-delusion has transformed huge swaths of the American populace into a peculiar species of adult-children who live in a Peter Pan world of make believe where reality is never permitted to be an impediment to desire. It is too bad Berman, who sees and writes about all this with a stunning clarity, lives in Mexico. It gets lonely up here.”
—Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion
“Morris Berman’s masterpiece is a brutally honest, wonderfully crafted,exceptionally well-documented treatise on how America was spawned, several hundred years ago, to devour its offspring—financially, socially, and technologically. Why America Failed shines a harsh, unavoidable light upon the cunning business mindset at the core of America’s creation, expansion, and devolution. Berman describes with stunning clarity how and why the ‘hustler’mentality, upon which our country was predicated, eviscerated alternative moral or social doctrines, and thus incorporated the seeds of our self-destruction from its very inception. This book is as uncomfortable to read as it is impossible to miss.”
—Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage and Other People’s Money
24 January 2012, 4:47 pmHenry:
From the inside flap of “Why America Failed” [The book could almost be described as the American example of the story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice]
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
During the final century of the Roman Empire, it was common for emperors to deny that their civilization was in decline. Only with the perspective of history can we see that the emperors were wrong, that the empire was failing, and that the Roman people were unwilling or unable to change their way of life before it was too late. The same, says Morris Berman, is true of twenty-first century America. The nation and its empire are in decline and nothing can be done to reverse their course. How did this come to be?
In Why America Failed, Berman examines the development of American culture from the earliest colonies to the present, shows that the seeds of the nation’s “hustler” culture were sown from the very beginning, and reveals how the very tools that enabled the country’s expansion have become the instruments of its demise.
At the center of Berman’s argument is his assertion that hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others have been powerful forces in American culture since the Pilgrims landed. He shows that even before the American Revolution, naked self-interest had replaced the common good as the primary social value in the colonies and that the creative power and destructive force of this idea gained irresistible momentum in the decades following the ratification of the Constitution. As invention proliferated and industry expanded, railroads, steamships, and telegraph wires quickened the frenetic pace of progress—or, as Berman calls it, the illusion of progress. An explosion of manufacturing whetted the nation’s ravenous appetite for goods of all kinds and gave the hustling life its purpose—to acquire as many objects as possible prior to death
The reign of Wall Street and the 2008 financial meltdown are certainly the most visible examples today of the negative consequences of the pursuit of affluence. Berman, however, sees the manipulations of Goldman Sachs and others not as some kind of aberration, but as the logical endpoint of the hustler culture. The fact that Goldman and its ilk continue to thrive in the wake of the disaster they wrought simply proves that it is already too late: America is incapable of changing direction.
24 January 2012, 4:58 pmCurt:
Well I still think that some people should get hit in the back of the head with a baeball bat or an ax just for the hell of it. Of course if Amricans are incapable of changing direction that is never going to happen to the people that I think deserve it.
24 January 2012, 6:03 pmm.c.:
Some of this was probably inevitable. We never had a nobility class(our closest thing are the Lawyer Caste; see Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.) QWe’re also a large melting pot with all the problems of that
24 January 2012, 8:01 pmm.c.:
John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence primarily because as New England’s wealthiest(or one of the wealthiest) merchant(s), he didn’t want to pay higher taxes.
There have been large landowners in the U.S. and later on barons like shipping & railroad magnates, but no formal nobility class attatched to an official Church; i.e. Church of England, Lutheran Church in some northern European nations, Roman Catholic Church, Russian Orthodox, etc. This put money in the fore of social mobility in the U.S.
Lyndon Johnson, when he met a new politician supposedly asked them if their Mother Married Up or Down on the Social Ladder. If their Mom Married Down, Johnson’s pop-pychology test was that the Mother Pushed their Son into Politics as a way of Social Compensation and they were natural Pols. If their Mom Married Up, then more likely than not the Son went into Politics as either a family business or on a lark, and wasn’t driven Internally, and thereby probably wasn’t a Natural at it.
25 January 2012, 8:11 pmCurt:
M.c.
26 January 2012, 4:19 amWhat percent of women marry niether up or down on the social ladder?
m.c.:
It’s not very scientific. Johnson probably used it as a ploy to get someone off their guard, to see how they reacted. They don’t make better politicians by his hypothesis, just their inner drive is to be a social climber and/or make money. A son of Duke in England say, who goes into politics because he’s bored, probably doesn’t need either the money or social status associated with Political Office, you get the idea….
26 January 2012, 12:44 pmSam:
If you own an Apple product, this may cause you to ditch them:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-16-2012/fear-factory
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/26/state-of-the-apple-rotten/
26 January 2012, 3:12 pmMichael Anderson:
The by-product (or MAIN product, if you will) of Industrial Capitalist “civilization.” This series of vids is sobering in its portrayal. Always, the periphery; always, the slaves.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/workingmansdeath/
About the series
In today’s technological age, is heavy manual labour disappearing or is it just becoming invisible? From the exhausted mine shafts of Ukraine to the bloody slaughterhouses of Nigeria, this series offers an unflinching portrait of physical labour in the 21st century, talking to the people engaged in this dreary, demanding and, often, dangerous work
29 January 2012, 3:22 pmSam:
Re: In today’s technological age, is heavy manual labour disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?
Very good question. And it’s not just “heavy” work, but simply mindless, soul-killing, work, as if human being were made to be like ants in an ant heap. The “dazzling”, sophisticated “cutting edge” modern world floats on an ocean of human misery and creates planetary destruction. At its core it is an act of suicide.
30 January 2012, 2:56 pmHenry:
The Noble Savage
by David Deming
The late Joseph Campbell maintained that civilizations are not based on science, but on myth. “Aspiration,” Campbell explained, “is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.” Our technological society has been built on Francis Bacon’s myth of the New Atlantis. Bacon was the first person to unambiguously and explicitly advocate the practical application of scientific knowledge to human needs. “The true and lawful goal of the sciences,” he explained, “is that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” Writing in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon predicted lasers, genetic engineering, airplanes, and submarines.
============================
Here’s what you’re up against if you try to see reality whole instead of surface-wise. This is one sick puppy masquerading as the voice of sanity and “realism.” As if evil is real and goodness and beauty are fantasy; hatred and violence are real, love and mercy are delusional; as if scorpions are real and not butterflies, deer, and gazelles. And so on. These are the mentalities that ruin the world. The Indians burned prairie grass–that is real; they also worshipped the Great Spirit; that is delusional. Incidentally, he hasn’t the faintest idea of the real meaning of the term “myth.”
14 February 2012, 3:13 amHenry:
Oops–sorry. Here is the URL:
The Noble Savage
http://lewrockwell.com/orig9/deming8.1.1.html
One of the unfortunate characteristics of the so-called “libertarians” is their total blindness regarding the ecological crisis, the reality of climate change, and the nature of the industrial and financial corporation. Austrian economics their religion. Of course, they love the psychopath Ayn Rand. Unfortunately, Ron Paul, is a fan of Lew Rockwell. The whole business is essentially a particularly crass form of pragmatism and nominalism.
14 February 2012, 3:19 amHenry:
Video: What to do About Apple and Fraud Friendly Manufacturing in China?
Former banking regulator and white collar criminologist Bill Black gives an unvarnished view of the behavior of Apple and other technology companies in dealing with suppliers in China. He does not buy the idea that the US is powerless to do anything about work condition in China and provides some concrete suggestions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-aMfp4v37o&feature=player_embedded
Bill Black: We need to ban imports produced while breaking laws of China
14 February 2012, 7:03 pmCurt:
The link that Henry posted above and a Max Keiser report that I saw a few days ago have caused me to asky myself a question that I ahve asked myself ten thousand times, but not for a few years. On the Max Keiser Report he or his guest called US sanctions against Iran an act of war. These sanctions might be diabolical but they are not an act of war.
16 February 2012, 3:51 amA non violent response exsists for the world to counter US economic and diplomatic and military pressure. It is to stop doing business with the US and restructure world trade to cut the US out of the loop. There is absolutely nothing that the US has that the rest of the world can not replace. US currency is not indespesible. The US ultimately is ruling the world not with guns not even with currency but with supirior ass kicking psychology.
Some people say that the US empire is in decline. Even if that is true the fact that they can still sucker much of the world to do what they want despite the weak position that the US is in is testamony to either………this………or…………that. Which I need not spell out because it is obvious to all of us.
The contradiction is how can a society or institutions which can produce individuals capable of fooling me be led by indiduals of completlely different
capabilities.
Curt:
In otherwords how can reasonably intellegent people allow their country to be ruled by people like Obama when they could be ruled by people like Charles.
16 February 2012, 7:43 amTo say it that way may insult some people. Do they deserve it? I think that is exactly the way it should be said and I will never of my own free will apologize for it.
Curt:
So, on CNN these sailors (an 02 and an o4)on the Abraham Lincoln were being interviewed while the ship is on deployment off the coast of Iran.
16 February 2012, 1:24 pmThey seemed to be proud Americans proclaiming how they were keeping the sealanes open an Iran in its place were the words of the Lt. Commander.
I thought to myself that a wife beater uses the same logic.
Do such people have the sense to wonder why an oil pipline has never been built around the straits of hormuz?
Curt:
Curt, I think that the answer to your question is quite simple. People usually form their political opinions in early adulthood. Then they no longer question their initial assumptions. They get busy living life. So if those initial assumptions were not very good they are politically handicapped for life. Those who take their political development seriously are often stunted in other areas. Take yourself as an example. Today a mechanic had to show you how to check the powersteering fluid on your own car. Some people would see that as disgraceful, especially considering your background.
16 February 2012, 3:52 pm